Autism is Reversible. A controversial statement for sure but for thousands of parents it is exactly the seed of hope that the Lord has ordained for this time.
As someone who had to learn to live within their own body and the constraints thereof, the basics of the biomedical intervention methods that trailblazing doctors and parents are pioneering resonate with me.
I am one of potentially millions of Americans who are enzyme deficient... my body simply doesn't make enough viable enzymes for me to digest certain things. Pretty much all products that come from a cow are off limits for me - both meat and milk. Same goes for any meats that are vibrant red and for eggs of any kind.
So how does that relate to autism? Simple: Foods are chemicals. That is a fundamental concept that most people would rather not entertain. Regardless, every piece of food you place in your mouth causes some sort of chemical reaction in the body.
The base theories being investigated in autism healing at the moment center around those chemical reactions - specifically often from wheat and dairy, and potentially triggered by mercury - are responsible for the core physiological problems that cause the range of symptoms that get lumped into the diagnosis called autism.
Cause for trigger is yet unknown but likely candidates are theorized to be a buildup of heavy metals in our bodies and environment, immune system overload from inoculation with live viruses and viral material, and exposure to bacteria and bacterioforms.
If you are a parent of a child who has been diagnosed with autism, take hope! And fire your existing doctor! (Because if you're reading this and it's news to you, you need a new one.)
Here are 2 good starter resources for learning more about the problems and potential treatments:
Friday, September 21, 2007
Thursday, September 06, 2007
Confessions of a Rebate Whore
Ok... so I admit it. I'm a rebate whore. There, I've said it. But really, aren't most techie shopaholics the same way?
Nothing says "DEAL" like a product that is free or almost free - after rebate. The newbs among us often forget that to get that deal you basically have to float the retailer or manufacturer a small loan. That float is returned 6-12 weeks later in the form of a rebate check.
Sure I'd probably be better off with a low price upfront. But there is an adrenaline rush that comes with going to the mailbox and picking out a rebate check that you "forgot about". (Yeah right! Who forgets about a check that's coming?!)
Here are some tricks and tips I use to make success with rebates much better:
Nothing says "DEAL" like a product that is free or almost free - after rebate. The newbs among us often forget that to get that deal you basically have to float the retailer or manufacturer a small loan. That float is returned 6-12 weeks later in the form of a rebate check.
Sure I'd probably be better off with a low price upfront. But there is an adrenaline rush that comes with going to the mailbox and picking out a rebate check that you "forgot about". (Yeah right! Who forgets about a check that's coming?!)
Here are some tricks and tips I use to make success with rebates much better:
- Fill out the rebate before you start using the product. Don't wait before submitting your rebate, unless the rules make you wait. While you're at it, read the rebate submission rules before you put your pen down. Most rebates follow a simple formula of complete the form, include copy of purchase receipt, original UPC... but high dollar rebates and those of annoying tech companies who shall remain nameless often have additional requirements, such as a signature, serial number, DNA sample or copy of the Magna Carta. It takes just a moment to read the fine print. Forget one little thing, and it's so long rebate, hello denial.
- Get the rebate form as a PDF whenever possible. Save the PDF on your computer. Personally, I take it a step further by scanning the completed rebate forms, receipts and even UPCs as PDFs on my PC. For this purpose I use one of the Brother MFC units I have and a Custom Scan button I have configured in their Control Center software to automatically scan to a file, save it as a PDF and put it in the "Rebates Due" folder on my hard drive. Since most rebates tells you to keep copies of the documentation until after the rebate arrives, this also eliminates paper clutter in my already cluttered office.
- Keep a spreadsheet, Word doc or other task list with rebate info, such as amount, date submitted, and rebate status URL if given. Since I use Google Apps and Gmail for my email, I also have a filter and tag setup for rebate status emails. That way I can see all my rebate emails with a single click.
- Make sure you have supplies handy. It's a total P-I-T-A not to have an envelope around when you need one. Also consider using a electronic postage program like Endicia or Stamps.com instead of hand writing the envelopes. That saves you from having to keep stamps around. Yes this costs a monthly fee... but if you do much other mailing the gas saved on trips to the post office for stamps will quickly save you enough to pay back the fee. The electronic postage also serves as proof of mailing since it logs the exact date and time the item was postmarked. For high dollar rebates you can add Delivery Confirmation for just a little more then the regular postage.
- And of course... Be lazy when possible! Look for shortcuts. Many rebates can be partially submitted online. Costco is great about doing that with all their rebates. OfficeMax's "Easy Rebate" is similar. You save them from having to read your crappy penmanship and pay someone do data entry. And in return you get status updates and tracking for your rebate. I consider that a fair trade.
Thursday, August 16, 2007
PRAY FOR THEM! Iraqi women: Prostituting ourselves to feed our children
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- The women are too afraid and ashamed to show their faces or have their real names used. They have been driven to sell their bodies to put food on the table for their children -- for as little as $8 a day.
Suha, 37, is a mother of three. She says her husband thinks she is cleaning houses when she leaves home."People shouldn't criticize women, or talk badly about them," says 37-year-old Suha as she adjusts the light colored scarf she wears these days to avoid extremists who insist women cover themselves. "They all say we have lost our way, but they never ask why we had to take this path."
A mother of three, she wears light makeup, a gold pendant of Iraq around her neck, and an unexpected air of elegance about her.
"I don't have money to take my kid to the doctor. I have to do anything that I can to preserve my child, because I am a mother," she says, explaining why she prostitutes herself.
Anger and frustration rise in her voice as she speaks.
"No matter what else I may be, no matter how off the path I may be, I am a mother!" Watch a woman describe turning to prostitution to "save my child" »
Her clasped hands clench and unclench nervously. Suha's husband thinks that she is cleaning houses when she goes away.
So does Karima's family.
"At the start I was cleaning homes, but I wasn't making much. No matter how hard I worked it just wasn't enough," she says.
Karima, clad in all black, adds, "My husband died of lung cancer nine months ago and left me with nothing."
She has five children, ages 8 to 17. Her eldest son could work, but she's too afraid for his life to let him go into the streets, preferring to sacrifice herself than risk her child.
She was solicited the first time when she was cleaning an office.
"They took advantage of me," she says softly. "At first I rejected it, but then I realized I have to do it."
Both Suha and Karima have clients that call them a couple times a week. Other women resort to trips to the market to find potential clients. Or they flag down vehicles.
Prostitution is a choice more and more Iraqi women are making just to survive.
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"It's increasing," Suha says. "I found this 'thing' through my friend, and I have another friend in the same predicament as mine. Because of the circumstance, she is forced to do such things."
Violence, increased cost of living, and lack of any sort of government aid leave women like these with few other options, according to humanitarian workers.
"At this point there is a population of women who have to sell their bodies in order to keep their children alive," says Yanar Mohammed, head and founder of the Organization for Women's Freedom in Iraq. "It's a taboo that no one is speaking about."
She adds, "There is a huge population of women who were the victims of war who had to sell their bodies, their souls and they lost it all. It crushes us to see them, but we have to work on it and that's why we started our team of women activists."
Her team pounds the streets of Baghdad looking for these victims often too humiliated to come forward.
"Most of the women that we find at hospitals [who] have tried to commit suicide" have been involved in prostitution, said Basma Rahim, a member of Mohammed's team.
The team's aim is to compile information on specific cases and present it to Iraq's political parties -- to have them, as Mohammed puts it, "come tell us what [they] are ... going to do about this."
Rahim tells the heartbreaking story of one woman they found who lives in a room with three of her children: "She has sex while her three children are in the room, but she makes them stand in separate corners."
According to Rahim and Mohammed, most of the women they encounter say they are driven to prostitution by a desperate desire for survival in the dangerously violent and unforgiving circumstances in Iraq.
"They took this path but they are not pleased," Rahim says.
Karima says when she sees her children with food on the table, she is able to convince herself that it's worth it. "Everything is for the children. They are the beauty in life and, without them, we cannot live."
But she says, "I would never allow my daughter to do this. I would rather marry her off at 13 than have her go through this."
Karima's last happy memory is of her late husband, when they were a family and able to shoulder the hardships of life in today's Iraq together.
Suha says as a young girl she dreamed of being a doctor, with her mom boasting about her potential in that career. Life couldn't have taken her further from that dream.
"It's not like we were born into this, nor was it ever in my blood," she says.
What she does for her family to survive now eats away at her. "I lay on my pillow and my brain is spinning, and it all comes back to me as if I am watching a movie."
Saturday, August 11, 2007
Find fiber near your business
Forever, and I mean FOREVER, it's been darn near impossible to find out what fiber is near a business. It's been even harder to find out what fiber is in a specific area in case you're looking to locate in the building that is already fiber connected.
The carriers specifically kept their fiber lit buildings lists under the cover of darkness. At most carriers, not even their own sales staff can look at maps and automatically visualize where the network they are trying to sell is located. They work off printed lists and general information about streets that the fiber networks run on.
This week that changed. The guys at Telarus, the first company to automate multi-carrier real-time T1 pricing via their GeoQuote and ShopforT1 system, released a system called ShopforEthernet on Wednesday.
Using ShopforEthernet, anyone with access to the internet can enter an address and see what lit buildings are near their address in a matter of seconds. No calling multiple carriers. No dealing with pestering sales guys. Real-time. Accurate. Reality today. If fiber is nearby, one of the product specialists who works with Telarus can provide the customer with pricing and find out about any buildout requirements.
Convincing the carriers to turn over the data was a mammoth undertaking. The control freaks at most of the major carriers initially balked. After some persuasion and reminding them that Telarus has a proven track record of automating real-time comparison quoting, Telarus was able to bring Level3, Time Warner Telecom, Caviler Telephone, Telnes Broadband, Megapath Networks, and XO Communications to the table. Several carriers are still on the fence and an unnamed incumbent carrier outright denied their request for information.
Enterprises needing 10, 20, 50 or 100mbps of Ethernet service, have historically had DS3s and bonded DS3s pushed at them because no one could tell them what fiber was nearby without a lot of work. (And sales guys don't like doing work when there is no guarantee of a sale.) And for enterprises needing gigabit ethernet and 10 gigabit ethernet service, it used to take weeks - yes, literally weeks - to get information back. ShopforEthernet immediately changes that game.
Telarus continues to be a disruptive force in the industry. They have been leading the charge for automation, automation, automation. No one else in the master agent industry empowers their agents with next generation tools like they do. In fact, most of their competitors wince when they announce a new back office feature or web tool because they know it will take a lot of work to catch up with Telarus' latest advancement.
The carriers specifically kept their fiber lit buildings lists under the cover of darkness. At most carriers, not even their own sales staff can look at maps and automatically visualize where the network they are trying to sell is located. They work off printed lists and general information about streets that the fiber networks run on.
This week that changed. The guys at Telarus, the first company to automate multi-carrier real-time T1 pricing via their GeoQuote and ShopforT1 system, released a system called ShopforEthernet on Wednesday.
Using ShopforEthernet, anyone with access to the internet can enter an address and see what lit buildings are near their address in a matter of seconds. No calling multiple carriers. No dealing with pestering sales guys. Real-time. Accurate. Reality today. If fiber is nearby, one of the product specialists who works with Telarus can provide the customer with pricing and find out about any buildout requirements.
Convincing the carriers to turn over the data was a mammoth undertaking. The control freaks at most of the major carriers initially balked. After some persuasion and reminding them that Telarus has a proven track record of automating real-time comparison quoting, Telarus was able to bring Level3, Time Warner Telecom, Caviler Telephone, Telnes Broadband, Megapath Networks, and XO Communications to the table. Several carriers are still on the fence and an unnamed incumbent carrier outright denied their request for information.
Enterprises needing 10, 20, 50 or 100mbps of Ethernet service, have historically had DS3s and bonded DS3s pushed at them because no one could tell them what fiber was nearby without a lot of work. (And sales guys don't like doing work when there is no guarantee of a sale.) And for enterprises needing gigabit ethernet and 10 gigabit ethernet service, it used to take weeks - yes, literally weeks - to get information back. ShopforEthernet immediately changes that game.
Telarus continues to be a disruptive force in the industry. They have been leading the charge for automation, automation, automation. No one else in the master agent industry empowers their agents with next generation tools like they do. In fact, most of their competitors wince when they announce a new back office feature or web tool because they know it will take a lot of work to catch up with Telarus' latest advancement.
Thursday, August 09, 2007
Quote that sounds like I could have written it...
Christine Comaford-Lynch, multi-business CEO and multi-millionaire put something into words in her recent book "Rules for Renegades: How to Make More Money, Rock Your Career, and Revel in Your Individuality" that sounds like it came out of my mouth. It succinctly sums up my business viewpoint, so I wanted to share.
"My greatest challenge when working with businesses is getting them to change course after they've poured tremendous resources into making something happen that isn't working.
"Remember: an illusion is something you use to change the reality around you. A delusion is something that prevents you from seeing the reality around you. The companies suffering under delusions prefer to die a slow death by staying in a losing proposition rather than accepting the risk that comes with being a quick change artist."
RULES FOR RENEGADES: Among Entrepreneur.com’s Top 10 Business Books This Summer! Click Here for details! Learn the New Rules
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
Coley’s Cancer-Killing Concoction
On October 1st 1890, William B. Coley, a young bone surgeon barely two years out of medical school, saw one of his first patients in private practice at the New York Memorial Hospital. Although he’d only finished his residency earlier the same year, he'd already gained a good reputation and many considered him a rising star of the New York surgical scene.
The seventeen year old patient had a painful, rapidly growing lump on the back of her right hand. She had pinched the unlucky appendage between two railway carriage seats on a transcontinental trip to Alaska some months before, and when the bruise failed to heal she assumed the injury had become infected. However the bruise turned into a bulge, the pain steadily worsened, and her baffled doctors were eventually compelled to call for Dr. Coley. As a surgical man, Coley would never have guessed that this innocuous referral would take his career in a totally new direction– into an unusual branch of medicine now known as cancer immunotherapy.
At first Dr. Coley was also uncertain about the diagnosis. But as the girl’s condition rapidly deteriorated– with the lump becoming larger, more painful, and associated with the loss of sensation in some of the surrounding skin– the awful truth became apparent. She had a sarcoma, a type of cancer that affects bone and connective tissue in the body. Unfortunately, 19th century medicine offered very few treatment options.
On November 8th, Coley amputated her arm at the elbow. Although the operation appeared to go well, the girl– named Elizabeth Dashiell– developed severe abdominal pain three weeks later. Soon thereafter she noticed more lumps in her breasts and armpits, signs that the cancer was metastasizing, or spreading. She rapidly lost strength and died on January 23rd 1891, a scant three and a half months after her initial consultation, with a traumatized Dr. Coley at her bedside.
Elizabeth’s death hit the young surgeon hard. While a more experienced physician might have shrugged away the apparent failure and moved on, Coley was determined to do something. His ensuing efforts culminated in the development of a famous fluid that, for a time, appeared to promise the fulfillment of that long-held dream: a universal cure for cancer.
Coley began by poring through the hospital’s records, looking for clues from previous sarcoma cases that might lead to better treatments in the future. He soon found what he was looking for: the case of a German man who came to the hospital with an egg-sized sarcoma in his left cheek some seven years earlier. There were several attempts to excise the tumour but none of them were successful– each time the cancer came back, as aggressive as before. The final operation could only partially remove the huge mass, leaving an open wound that subsequently became infected. The unfortunate immigrant was deemed a terminal case.
Yet four and a half months later, the man was discharged with no trace of disease. Coley personally tracked down the former patient to verify that the miraculous cure had taken place. Indeed, the man was healthy and happily settled into his new life in the United States. The records showed that after the wound became infected with a commonplace bacterium, Streptococcus pyogenes, the patient went through several bouts of fever. With each attack of fever the tumour shrank until eventually it disappeared entirely, leaving only a large scar under the left ear. Coley surmised that the infection had stimulated the German’s immune system– as evidenced by the repeated fevers– and that it was this immune response that had caused the eradication of the cancer.
The story so convinced Coley that he– perhaps cavalierly– contrived to contaminate his next ten suitable sarcoma cases with Streptococcus. His initial approach was to inject a solution of live bacteria deep into the tumour mass on a repeated basis over several months. The first patient to undergo this treatment was a bedridden man with inoperable sarcoma in the abdominal wall, bladder, and pelvis. Using this experimental method, the patient was cured spectacularly. He staged a full recovery, and survived another twenty-six years before dying from a heart attack. But subsequent results were mixed; sometimes it was difficult to get the infection to take hold, and in two cases the cancer responded well to treatment but the patients died from the Streptococcus infection.
Coley’s discovery, as it turns out, was actually a re-discovery. The idea of a link between acute infection and the resolution of tumours was not new, and the phenomenon of infection-related "spontaneous regression" of cancer has been documented throughout history. A 13th century Italian saint was reputed to have his tumour-afflicted leg miraculously healed shortly after the malignant growth burst through the skin and became infected. Crude cancer immunotherapies working along similar lines to Coley’s early experiments were known in the 18th and 19th centuries, and may extend back to the time of the pharaohs. Ancient writings suggest that the renowned Egyptian physician Imhotep may have used a similar infect-and-incise method to treat tumours.
But Coley took those first important steps in dragging this old remedy into the twentieth century. After the fatalities with the ‘live’ version of his therapy, he developed an improved fluid containing killed bacteria of two different strains, Streptococcus pyogenes and Serratia marcescens. This was based on the idea that the dead bacteria would still have the immune-stimulating capability of their living brethren (in the form of purported ‘toxins’), but not share their inconvenient tendency to cause death. His invention became variously known as ‘Coley’s Toxins’, ‘Coley’s Vaccine’, ‘Mixed Bacterial Toxins’ or ‘Coley Fluid.’ The treatment was met with considerable success, with one study in 1999 suggesting that it was at least equally as effective in treating cancer as conventional modern therapies. With due care in dosing and management of the induced fever, it was also remarkably safe.
Although Coley took the concept of immunotherapy much further than his pharaonic forebears, he had no clear idea how his toxins actually worked, and the tools did not yet exist for him to find out. But given the rapid scientific progress at the turn of the last century, he reasoned that a deeper understanding of his therapy would arrive soon enough. Although the true extent of his "Toxin" success has been questioned by historians, the validity of his approach has never been seriously called into doubt. Indeed his results are regularly cited in the cancer research literature to this day.
Over the following years Coley continued to refine his technique. He determined that the toxins should be administered to patients at progressively higher doses to counter the body’s innate "immune tolerance" to the treatment. Other physicians in America and Europe also experimented with the method, and found that the toxins appeared to work just as well in a number of different non-sarcoma cancer types such as carcinoma, lymphoma, and melanoma. They could also be given intravenously some distance from the site of the tumour, and still be effective. Variations on the basic bacterial recipe and different dosing regimes were tried, depending on the individual patient and the particular cancer’s type and proliferation. Through his career Coley himself treated over one hundred patients with his concoction, and countless more were treated by other doctors.
As the fame of his fluid grew, so did Dr Coley’s stature: in 1915 he became head of the Bone Service at the New York Memorial Hospital (which later became the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center). By the time he died in 1936, Coley’s Toxins were mentioned in a number of different surgical textbooks as a standard anti-cancer therapy.
Conventional modern medicine, however, very rarely employs Coley’s Toxins in the treatment of cancer, for reasons almost as complicated as the human immune system itself. One concern is the far-from-complete understanding of the mechanism of action; generally, doctors are reluctant to administer treatments whose workings they don’t fully comprehend. The stimulated human immune system is a whirling tempest of different physiological and biochemical responses, and even now there’s much uncertainty about how Coley’s Toxins modified this complex mechanism to better attack its cancerous target. One theory stresses the importance of the fluid-induced fever in killing the cancer cells; another considers the debris-engulfing macrophage cells to be the main players, while others consider various different immune messenger molecules– or cytokines– to be important.
The eclipsing of Coley’s Toxins also had something to do with the concurrent development of radiation therapy and, a little later, chemotherapy. Soon after Wilhelm Roentgen discovered X-rays in 1895, the possibility of using radioactivity to treat cancer was investigated. The technology was exciting, new, and developing fast along well-understood principles. Although the first results of radiotherapy weren’t all that impressive, it had the advantage of fractional doses, and once the equipment was in place it didn’t require the complicated, patient-specific preparation which was needed with Coley’s Toxins. Likewise chemotherapy was based on known scientific principles, and could be manufactured and used relatively easily.
Furthermore, both radiotherapy and chemotherapy have an immune-suppressing side-effect. Since both treatments kill the rapidly dividing cells of the immune system along with the rapidly dividing cancer cells, both can be used together if care is taken. But immune-stimulating Coley’s Toxins work entirely differently, and their effect would be cancelled out if used at the same time as high-dose immunosuppressant chemo- or radiotherapy. It became an either/or situation– and in the end, the fashionable new treatments won out over Coley’s fiddly reworking of an ancient 'natural' remedy.
So when the US Food and Drug Administration changed the status of Coley’s Toxins to that of a 'new drug' in 1963– meaning that it could only be used in clinical trials, and greatly reducing its availability– it seemed that its time had already long passed. But cancer immunotherapy does have limited applications today. Perhaps its most frequent mainstream use is in the treatment of bladder cancer; solutions containing the tuberculosis vaccine are routinely instilled into cancer-affected bladders, and are effective in causing regression of tumour deposits. It is theorized that the bladder's immune response deals with the cancer in a similar way to the whole-body immune effect of Coley’s Toxins. Melanoma, a particularly nasty type of skin cancer that responds poorly to conventional radiotherapy and chemotherapy, is sometimes treated with an immune-stimulating cytokine called interferon.
In some ways this century-old form of treatment is still a fringe area of medicine. But researchers have once again begun to probe the possibilities of immunotherapy. New antibody-based treatments like Mabthera and Herceptin are making a real difference in the treatment of common cancers like lymphoma and breast cancer. Although these therapies don’t stimulate the body’s immunity as a whole, they are based on antibody molecules which are key components of the human immune system. They show that our increasing knowledge of the molecular nitty-gritty of the body’s own defence and repair network is starting to make a real difference in the battle against cancer. One tumour at a time, such advances in modern medicine are finally vindicating William Coley and his one-hundred-year-old cancer-killing concoction.
The seventeen year old patient had a painful, rapidly growing lump on the back of her right hand. She had pinched the unlucky appendage between two railway carriage seats on a transcontinental trip to Alaska some months before, and when the bruise failed to heal she assumed the injury had become infected. However the bruise turned into a bulge, the pain steadily worsened, and her baffled doctors were eventually compelled to call for Dr. Coley. As a surgical man, Coley would never have guessed that this innocuous referral would take his career in a totally new direction– into an unusual branch of medicine now known as cancer immunotherapy.
At first Dr. Coley was also uncertain about the diagnosis. But as the girl’s condition rapidly deteriorated– with the lump becoming larger, more painful, and associated with the loss of sensation in some of the surrounding skin– the awful truth became apparent. She had a sarcoma, a type of cancer that affects bone and connective tissue in the body. Unfortunately, 19th century medicine offered very few treatment options.
On November 8th, Coley amputated her arm at the elbow. Although the operation appeared to go well, the girl– named Elizabeth Dashiell– developed severe abdominal pain three weeks later. Soon thereafter she noticed more lumps in her breasts and armpits, signs that the cancer was metastasizing, or spreading. She rapidly lost strength and died on January 23rd 1891, a scant three and a half months after her initial consultation, with a traumatized Dr. Coley at her bedside.
Elizabeth’s death hit the young surgeon hard. While a more experienced physician might have shrugged away the apparent failure and moved on, Coley was determined to do something. His ensuing efforts culminated in the development of a famous fluid that, for a time, appeared to promise the fulfillment of that long-held dream: a universal cure for cancer.
Coley began by poring through the hospital’s records, looking for clues from previous sarcoma cases that might lead to better treatments in the future. He soon found what he was looking for: the case of a German man who came to the hospital with an egg-sized sarcoma in his left cheek some seven years earlier. There were several attempts to excise the tumour but none of them were successful– each time the cancer came back, as aggressive as before. The final operation could only partially remove the huge mass, leaving an open wound that subsequently became infected. The unfortunate immigrant was deemed a terminal case.
Yet four and a half months later, the man was discharged with no trace of disease. Coley personally tracked down the former patient to verify that the miraculous cure had taken place. Indeed, the man was healthy and happily settled into his new life in the United States. The records showed that after the wound became infected with a commonplace bacterium, Streptococcus pyogenes, the patient went through several bouts of fever. With each attack of fever the tumour shrank until eventually it disappeared entirely, leaving only a large scar under the left ear. Coley surmised that the infection had stimulated the German’s immune system– as evidenced by the repeated fevers– and that it was this immune response that had caused the eradication of the cancer.
The story so convinced Coley that he– perhaps cavalierly– contrived to contaminate his next ten suitable sarcoma cases with Streptococcus. His initial approach was to inject a solution of live bacteria deep into the tumour mass on a repeated basis over several months. The first patient to undergo this treatment was a bedridden man with inoperable sarcoma in the abdominal wall, bladder, and pelvis. Using this experimental method, the patient was cured spectacularly. He staged a full recovery, and survived another twenty-six years before dying from a heart attack. But subsequent results were mixed; sometimes it was difficult to get the infection to take hold, and in two cases the cancer responded well to treatment but the patients died from the Streptococcus infection.
Coley’s discovery, as it turns out, was actually a re-discovery. The idea of a link between acute infection and the resolution of tumours was not new, and the phenomenon of infection-related "spontaneous regression" of cancer has been documented throughout history. A 13th century Italian saint was reputed to have his tumour-afflicted leg miraculously healed shortly after the malignant growth burst through the skin and became infected. Crude cancer immunotherapies working along similar lines to Coley’s early experiments were known in the 18th and 19th centuries, and may extend back to the time of the pharaohs. Ancient writings suggest that the renowned Egyptian physician Imhotep may have used a similar infect-and-incise method to treat tumours.
But Coley took those first important steps in dragging this old remedy into the twentieth century. After the fatalities with the ‘live’ version of his therapy, he developed an improved fluid containing killed bacteria of two different strains, Streptococcus pyogenes and Serratia marcescens. This was based on the idea that the dead bacteria would still have the immune-stimulating capability of their living brethren (in the form of purported ‘toxins’), but not share their inconvenient tendency to cause death. His invention became variously known as ‘Coley’s Toxins’, ‘Coley’s Vaccine’, ‘Mixed Bacterial Toxins’ or ‘Coley Fluid.’ The treatment was met with considerable success, with one study in 1999 suggesting that it was at least equally as effective in treating cancer as conventional modern therapies. With due care in dosing and management of the induced fever, it was also remarkably safe.
Although Coley took the concept of immunotherapy much further than his pharaonic forebears, he had no clear idea how his toxins actually worked, and the tools did not yet exist for him to find out. But given the rapid scientific progress at the turn of the last century, he reasoned that a deeper understanding of his therapy would arrive soon enough. Although the true extent of his "Toxin" success has been questioned by historians, the validity of his approach has never been seriously called into doubt. Indeed his results are regularly cited in the cancer research literature to this day.
Over the following years Coley continued to refine his technique. He determined that the toxins should be administered to patients at progressively higher doses to counter the body’s innate "immune tolerance" to the treatment. Other physicians in America and Europe also experimented with the method, and found that the toxins appeared to work just as well in a number of different non-sarcoma cancer types such as carcinoma, lymphoma, and melanoma. They could also be given intravenously some distance from the site of the tumour, and still be effective. Variations on the basic bacterial recipe and different dosing regimes were tried, depending on the individual patient and the particular cancer’s type and proliferation. Through his career Coley himself treated over one hundred patients with his concoction, and countless more were treated by other doctors.
As the fame of his fluid grew, so did Dr Coley’s stature: in 1915 he became head of the Bone Service at the New York Memorial Hospital (which later became the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center). By the time he died in 1936, Coley’s Toxins were mentioned in a number of different surgical textbooks as a standard anti-cancer therapy.
Conventional modern medicine, however, very rarely employs Coley’s Toxins in the treatment of cancer, for reasons almost as complicated as the human immune system itself. One concern is the far-from-complete understanding of the mechanism of action; generally, doctors are reluctant to administer treatments whose workings they don’t fully comprehend. The stimulated human immune system is a whirling tempest of different physiological and biochemical responses, and even now there’s much uncertainty about how Coley’s Toxins modified this complex mechanism to better attack its cancerous target. One theory stresses the importance of the fluid-induced fever in killing the cancer cells; another considers the debris-engulfing macrophage cells to be the main players, while others consider various different immune messenger molecules– or cytokines– to be important.
The eclipsing of Coley’s Toxins also had something to do with the concurrent development of radiation therapy and, a little later, chemotherapy. Soon after Wilhelm Roentgen discovered X-rays in 1895, the possibility of using radioactivity to treat cancer was investigated. The technology was exciting, new, and developing fast along well-understood principles. Although the first results of radiotherapy weren’t all that impressive, it had the advantage of fractional doses, and once the equipment was in place it didn’t require the complicated, patient-specific preparation which was needed with Coley’s Toxins. Likewise chemotherapy was based on known scientific principles, and could be manufactured and used relatively easily.
Furthermore, both radiotherapy and chemotherapy have an immune-suppressing side-effect. Since both treatments kill the rapidly dividing cells of the immune system along with the rapidly dividing cancer cells, both can be used together if care is taken. But immune-stimulating Coley’s Toxins work entirely differently, and their effect would be cancelled out if used at the same time as high-dose immunosuppressant chemo- or radiotherapy. It became an either/or situation– and in the end, the fashionable new treatments won out over Coley’s fiddly reworking of an ancient 'natural' remedy.
So when the US Food and Drug Administration changed the status of Coley’s Toxins to that of a 'new drug' in 1963– meaning that it could only be used in clinical trials, and greatly reducing its availability– it seemed that its time had already long passed. But cancer immunotherapy does have limited applications today. Perhaps its most frequent mainstream use is in the treatment of bladder cancer; solutions containing the tuberculosis vaccine are routinely instilled into cancer-affected bladders, and are effective in causing regression of tumour deposits. It is theorized that the bladder's immune response deals with the cancer in a similar way to the whole-body immune effect of Coley’s Toxins. Melanoma, a particularly nasty type of skin cancer that responds poorly to conventional radiotherapy and chemotherapy, is sometimes treated with an immune-stimulating cytokine called interferon.
In some ways this century-old form of treatment is still a fringe area of medicine. But researchers have once again begun to probe the possibilities of immunotherapy. New antibody-based treatments like Mabthera and Herceptin are making a real difference in the treatment of common cancers like lymphoma and breast cancer. Although these therapies don’t stimulate the body’s immunity as a whole, they are based on antibody molecules which are key components of the human immune system. They show that our increasing knowledge of the molecular nitty-gritty of the body’s own defence and repair network is starting to make a real difference in the battle against cancer. One tumour at a time, such advances in modern medicine are finally vindicating William Coley and his one-hundred-year-old cancer-killing concoction.
Friday, July 13, 2007
10 things your restaurant won't tell you
1. "It's more about the sizzle than the steak."
Business is good for the restaurant industry. Americans now spend roughly half their food budget dining out, and restaurants expect revenue of more than $537 billion in 2007. That's a 67% increase since 1997.
But it's not just our collective avoidance of the kitchen that's pumping profits: Restaurants work every angle these days, using marketing psychology to get you to spend more.
At legendary Aureole Las Vegas, spandex-clad "wine angels" retrieve bottles from a 42-foot-tall spirits tower. The thinking behind the spectacle: "Anything that gets patrons' attention will get them to spend," says restaurant designer Mark Stech-Novak.
Fast-food outlets use a high-stimulus environment to maximize the source of their profit: "It encourages faster turnover," says Stephani Robson, a senior lecturer at the Cornell School of Hotel Administration. "Specifically, the use of bright light, bright colors, upbeat music and seating that does not encourage lolling."
Even menus are rigged. "We list the item that makes the most profit first so it catches your eye," says restaurant consultant Linda Lipsky, "and bury the highest-cost item in the middle."
2. "Eating here could make you sick."
The 2006 E. coli outbreak that started at a New Jersey Taco Bell and sickened more than 60 people was traced to green onions. But food-borne illness isn't the only cause for concern: In a separate December incident, 373 people in Indianapolis got sick after eating at an Olive Garden where three employees tested positive for the highly contagious norovirus.
"You don't call out (sick) unless you're on your deathbed," says freelance chef Leah Grossman. Indeed, according to a recent study, 58% of salaried New York City restaurant workers reported going to work when sick; the number is even higher for those without benefits.
"A lot of poor, transient people work in restaurants," says Peter Francis, a co-author of industry exposé "How to Burn Down the House." "They're not giving up the $100 they'd make in a shift because they're sick."
How can you protect yourself? Check inspection results, which are often posted online by local departments of public health. Or just visit the restroom; it "tells you everything you need to know about a restaurant," Francis says.
3. "Our markups are ridiculous."
It's no secret that restaurants enjoy huge markups on certain items: Coffee, tea and sodas, for example, typically cost restaurants 15 to 20 cents per serving, and pasta, which costs pennies, can be dressed up with more expensive fare and sold for $25 a dish or more. At a fine-dining restaurant, the average cost of food is 38% to 42% of the menu price, says Kevin Moll, the CEO and president of National Food Service Advisors. In other words, most restaurants are making roughly 60% on anything they serve.
It's not all gravy though. Restaurants keep only 4 cents of every dollar spent by a customer, says Hudson Riehle, the vice president of research and information services at the National Restaurant Association. The remainder of the money, he says, is divided among food and beverage purchases, payroll, occupancy and other overhead costs.
Given the slim profit margin, many restaurants rely on savvy pricing to create the illusion of value. Putting a chicken dish on the menu for $21 will make a $15 pasta dish, where the restaurant is making a big profit, seem like a bargain, says Gregg Rapp, the owner of consulting firm MenuTechnologies.net.
4. "Big Brother is watching you . . . eat."
No one likes having their every move scrutinized, but that may be just what's happening at your favorite restaurant. Cameras are popping up everywhere, from four-star eateries to the place where you grab your lunchtime sandwich.
At historic Randy's Steakhouse in Frisco, Texas, where checks average $45 to $50, co-owner Don Burks has installed 12 cameras around the premises. Of those, two pick up activity in the dining rooms, and two are aimed at the bar.
"We've had customers stand on chairs to try to take out a camera," Burks says. "But the cameras aren't even pointed at them; they're pointed at the wine rack." Their primary purpose: deterring employee theft.
At some restaurants, however, the cameras are indeed trained on the tables. At New York City's four-star Daniel, for example, four closed-circuit cameras monitor the dining rooms, offering a bird's-eye view of every plate.
"It's about maintaining a quality of service," says Daniel spokeswoman Georgette Farkas. "With the cameras, the chef can tell when each course needs to be plated and served." So much for that romantic dinner for two.
5. "There's something fishy about our seafood."
Even when you pay top dollar for a seafood dish, you might not get what you're expecting. About 70% of the time, for example, those Maryland crab cakes on the menu weren't made using crabs from Chesapeake Bay, says James Anderson, the chairman of the Department of Environmental and Natural Resource Economics at the University of Rhode Island. Because of high demand, crabs are often from other Eastern states or imported from Thailand and Vietnam. (Look closely at the menu: "Maryland-style" crab is the giveaway.)
There's also the problem of outright substitution -- inexpensive fish, such as pollack, getting passed off as something pricier, like cod. How widespread is the problem? In 2006 the Daytona Beach (Fla.) News-Journal sent fish samples to a lab to prove that four out of 10 local restaurants were pawning a cheaper fish as grouper. The same lab also checked seafood from 24 U.S. cities and found that, overall, consumers have less than a 50-50 shot at being served the fish they ordered.
What can you do? Ask where the fish comes from. "If they're not sure if the fish is from Alaska or Asia, I order the beef," Anderson says.
6. "Reservation? What reservation?"
When Timothy Dillon, 34, showed up at new Chicago trattoria Terragusto for his friend's birthday, he wasn't expecting a wait. He'd made a reservation for four, then called the day of to confirm and add one more. The restaurant told him no problem, but when the party showed up, they were met with a long wait.
"After almost an hour of standing by the bar being ignored, we ended up leaving for another restaurant," Dillon says. Terragusto says it was its first week open: "We were probably working out a lot of glitches," a spokesperson says.
As Dillon discovered, a reservation isn't a guarantee. "Overbooking is almost a necessary evil," says John Fischer, associate professor of table service at the Culinary Institute of America. Restaurants calculate their average no-show percentage for any given night, then overbook the restaurant by that much, hoping it will come out even.
How to avoid Dillon's fate? It's considered poor taste to offer a tip before you're seated, Fischer says, so if it's your first time, inquire politely after 15 minutes. But go ahead and slip the manager or maître d' $10 or $20 on the way out; it should ensure you're seated promptly next time.
7. "Our specials are anything but."
"I'm very careful about ordering my food," says Rick Manson, the owner of Chef Rick's restaurant in Santa Maria, Calif. If he orders oysters, Manson says, he'll offer multiple dishes on the menu that use oysters, "to make sure I use every one of them." Nonetheless, countless variables can leave surplus ingredients at the end of the day -- which often become tomorrow's special.
"It could be the chef legitimately wants to try out something new," says Stephen Zagor, the founder of consulting firm Hospitality & Culinary Resources. "But it could also be something nearing the end of its shelf life that needs to get out of the kitchen."
How can you tell a good special from a bad one? Watch out for "an expensive item used in a way that's minimizing its flavor," Zagor says, such as a lamb chop that's been cut, braised and put into a dish where it's a supporting player.
Pastas, stews and soups containing expensive meats are also suspect. "There's an old saying in the restaurant industry," says David A. Holmes, the vice president and director of Out East Restaurant Consultants. "'Sauce and gravy cover up a lot of mistakes.'"
8. "There's no such thing as too much butter."
Think that salmon fillet you ordered for dinner is good for you? Think again. Restaurants load even their healthiest fare with butter and other calorie-heavy add-ons. Restaurant meals average 1,000 to 1,500 calories, says Milton Stokes, a registered dietitian and spokesman for the American Dietetic Association. That's roughly two-thirds of the daily average calories recommended by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. And according to a recent study, women who eat out five times a week consume an average of 290 additional calories per day.
Though most Americans assume that fast food is the worst offender, similar fare at casual sit-down restaurants can be even more caloric. The classic burger at Ruby Tuesday, for example, has a whopping 1,013 calories and 71 grams of fat. The McDonald's Big Mac, with its 540 calories and 29 grams of fat, seems downright diet-worthy by comparison.
"We butter our hamburger buns," says Julie Reid, the vice president of culinary for Ruby Tuesday, "so we tell people if they're looking to cut calories, they shouldn't eat the bun." If that sounds less than appetizing, try splitting an entrée with someone, or order an appetizer instead of a main dish.
9. "Nice tip -- too bad your waiter won't get it."
Just because you tip your waitress 10 bucks, it doesn't mean she's going home with that money. More than likely, she'll have to pass on some of it to the people who helped her serve you: The bartender might get $2, and the busboy $3 to $5. It's called a tip pool, and it's becoming standard practice in many restaurants. "It happens often that if someone leaves a voluntary tip (for their server), a significant portion of that money is going to other people," Zagor says.
According to federal law, only employees who customarily receive tips -- wait staff, hosts, bartenders and bussers -- can participate in the tip pool. But sometimes management takes a cut. In 2006, waitstaff from the Hilltop Steak House in Saugus, Mass., won $2.5 million in damages after complaining that managers dipped into their tips.
Mandatory gratuities are also divvied up. At high-end restaurants such as New York City's Per Se and Napa Valley's French Laundry, both owned by chef Thomas Keller, the practice is called service compris.
"The 20% service charge is clearly stated on the menu, and it's equally divided among the staff," says a spokesperson for both restaurants. Though the tip pool is designed to foster a team environment among staff, for customers it means something else entirely: that your gratuity isn't specifically rewarding the waiter or sommelier who provided you with exemplary service.
10. "Never go out to eat on a Monday."
If you think that Monday, when restaurants tend not to be crowded, is a great time to eat out, think again. "You're being served all of the weekend's leftovers," says Francis, the exposé co-author. Kitchens prepare food on a first-in, first-out basis, meaning whatever is oldest gets served first. It's a way to ensure that everything on the menu is as fresh as possible.
The system works great most days, but it can run into a little glitch over the weekend. Distributors typically take Sunday off and make their last deliveries Saturday morning, which means that by Monday any food not used over the weekend is at least three to four days old. And it will be served before the same ingredients arriving in Monday's delivery.
What to do if you wish to dine out on a Monday? Ignore your instincts and go to a place that's perpetually crowded. "If you are open 24/7 and busy all the time," says New York chef Lucia Calvete, "all your ingredients are fresh all the time."
This article was reported and written by Christine Bockelman for SmartMoney.
Business is good for the restaurant industry. Americans now spend roughly half their food budget dining out, and restaurants expect revenue of more than $537 billion in 2007. That's a 67% increase since 1997.
But it's not just our collective avoidance of the kitchen that's pumping profits: Restaurants work every angle these days, using marketing psychology to get you to spend more.
At legendary Aureole Las Vegas, spandex-clad "wine angels" retrieve bottles from a 42-foot-tall spirits tower. The thinking behind the spectacle: "Anything that gets patrons' attention will get them to spend," says restaurant designer Mark Stech-Novak.
Fast-food outlets use a high-stimulus environment to maximize the source of their profit: "It encourages faster turnover," says Stephani Robson, a senior lecturer at the Cornell School of Hotel Administration. "Specifically, the use of bright light, bright colors, upbeat music and seating that does not encourage lolling."
Even menus are rigged. "We list the item that makes the most profit first so it catches your eye," says restaurant consultant Linda Lipsky, "and bury the highest-cost item in the middle."
2. "Eating here could make you sick."
The 2006 E. coli outbreak that started at a New Jersey Taco Bell and sickened more than 60 people was traced to green onions. But food-borne illness isn't the only cause for concern: In a separate December incident, 373 people in Indianapolis got sick after eating at an Olive Garden where three employees tested positive for the highly contagious norovirus.
"You don't call out (sick) unless you're on your deathbed," says freelance chef Leah Grossman. Indeed, according to a recent study, 58% of salaried New York City restaurant workers reported going to work when sick; the number is even higher for those without benefits.
"A lot of poor, transient people work in restaurants," says Peter Francis, a co-author of industry exposé "How to Burn Down the House." "They're not giving up the $100 they'd make in a shift because they're sick."
How can you protect yourself? Check inspection results, which are often posted online by local departments of public health. Or just visit the restroom; it "tells you everything you need to know about a restaurant," Francis says.
3. "Our markups are ridiculous."
It's no secret that restaurants enjoy huge markups on certain items: Coffee, tea and sodas, for example, typically cost restaurants 15 to 20 cents per serving, and pasta, which costs pennies, can be dressed up with more expensive fare and sold for $25 a dish or more. At a fine-dining restaurant, the average cost of food is 38% to 42% of the menu price, says Kevin Moll, the CEO and president of National Food Service Advisors. In other words, most restaurants are making roughly 60% on anything they serve.
It's not all gravy though. Restaurants keep only 4 cents of every dollar spent by a customer, says Hudson Riehle, the vice president of research and information services at the National Restaurant Association. The remainder of the money, he says, is divided among food and beverage purchases, payroll, occupancy and other overhead costs.
Given the slim profit margin, many restaurants rely on savvy pricing to create the illusion of value. Putting a chicken dish on the menu for $21 will make a $15 pasta dish, where the restaurant is making a big profit, seem like a bargain, says Gregg Rapp, the owner of consulting firm MenuTechnologies.net.
4. "Big Brother is watching you . . . eat."
No one likes having their every move scrutinized, but that may be just what's happening at your favorite restaurant. Cameras are popping up everywhere, from four-star eateries to the place where you grab your lunchtime sandwich.
At historic Randy's Steakhouse in Frisco, Texas, where checks average $45 to $50, co-owner Don Burks has installed 12 cameras around the premises. Of those, two pick up activity in the dining rooms, and two are aimed at the bar.
"We've had customers stand on chairs to try to take out a camera," Burks says. "But the cameras aren't even pointed at them; they're pointed at the wine rack." Their primary purpose: deterring employee theft.
At some restaurants, however, the cameras are indeed trained on the tables. At New York City's four-star Daniel, for example, four closed-circuit cameras monitor the dining rooms, offering a bird's-eye view of every plate.
"It's about maintaining a quality of service," says Daniel spokeswoman Georgette Farkas. "With the cameras, the chef can tell when each course needs to be plated and served." So much for that romantic dinner for two.
5. "There's something fishy about our seafood."
Even when you pay top dollar for a seafood dish, you might not get what you're expecting. About 70% of the time, for example, those Maryland crab cakes on the menu weren't made using crabs from Chesapeake Bay, says James Anderson, the chairman of the Department of Environmental and Natural Resource Economics at the University of Rhode Island. Because of high demand, crabs are often from other Eastern states or imported from Thailand and Vietnam. (Look closely at the menu: "Maryland-style" crab is the giveaway.)
There's also the problem of outright substitution -- inexpensive fish, such as pollack, getting passed off as something pricier, like cod. How widespread is the problem? In 2006 the Daytona Beach (Fla.) News-Journal sent fish samples to a lab to prove that four out of 10 local restaurants were pawning a cheaper fish as grouper. The same lab also checked seafood from 24 U.S. cities and found that, overall, consumers have less than a 50-50 shot at being served the fish they ordered.
What can you do? Ask where the fish comes from. "If they're not sure if the fish is from Alaska or Asia, I order the beef," Anderson says.
6. "Reservation? What reservation?"
When Timothy Dillon, 34, showed up at new Chicago trattoria Terragusto for his friend's birthday, he wasn't expecting a wait. He'd made a reservation for four, then called the day of to confirm and add one more. The restaurant told him no problem, but when the party showed up, they were met with a long wait.
"After almost an hour of standing by the bar being ignored, we ended up leaving for another restaurant," Dillon says. Terragusto says it was its first week open: "We were probably working out a lot of glitches," a spokesperson says.
As Dillon discovered, a reservation isn't a guarantee. "Overbooking is almost a necessary evil," says John Fischer, associate professor of table service at the Culinary Institute of America. Restaurants calculate their average no-show percentage for any given night, then overbook the restaurant by that much, hoping it will come out even.
How to avoid Dillon's fate? It's considered poor taste to offer a tip before you're seated, Fischer says, so if it's your first time, inquire politely after 15 minutes. But go ahead and slip the manager or maître d' $10 or $20 on the way out; it should ensure you're seated promptly next time.
7. "Our specials are anything but."
"I'm very careful about ordering my food," says Rick Manson, the owner of Chef Rick's restaurant in Santa Maria, Calif. If he orders oysters, Manson says, he'll offer multiple dishes on the menu that use oysters, "to make sure I use every one of them." Nonetheless, countless variables can leave surplus ingredients at the end of the day -- which often become tomorrow's special.
"It could be the chef legitimately wants to try out something new," says Stephen Zagor, the founder of consulting firm Hospitality & Culinary Resources. "But it could also be something nearing the end of its shelf life that needs to get out of the kitchen."
How can you tell a good special from a bad one? Watch out for "an expensive item used in a way that's minimizing its flavor," Zagor says, such as a lamb chop that's been cut, braised and put into a dish where it's a supporting player.
Pastas, stews and soups containing expensive meats are also suspect. "There's an old saying in the restaurant industry," says David A. Holmes, the vice president and director of Out East Restaurant Consultants. "'Sauce and gravy cover up a lot of mistakes.'"
8. "There's no such thing as too much butter."
Think that salmon fillet you ordered for dinner is good for you? Think again. Restaurants load even their healthiest fare with butter and other calorie-heavy add-ons. Restaurant meals average 1,000 to 1,500 calories, says Milton Stokes, a registered dietitian and spokesman for the American Dietetic Association. That's roughly two-thirds of the daily average calories recommended by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. And according to a recent study, women who eat out five times a week consume an average of 290 additional calories per day.
Though most Americans assume that fast food is the worst offender, similar fare at casual sit-down restaurants can be even more caloric. The classic burger at Ruby Tuesday, for example, has a whopping 1,013 calories and 71 grams of fat. The McDonald's Big Mac, with its 540 calories and 29 grams of fat, seems downright diet-worthy by comparison.
"We butter our hamburger buns," says Julie Reid, the vice president of culinary for Ruby Tuesday, "so we tell people if they're looking to cut calories, they shouldn't eat the bun." If that sounds less than appetizing, try splitting an entrée with someone, or order an appetizer instead of a main dish.
9. "Nice tip -- too bad your waiter won't get it."
Just because you tip your waitress 10 bucks, it doesn't mean she's going home with that money. More than likely, she'll have to pass on some of it to the people who helped her serve you: The bartender might get $2, and the busboy $3 to $5. It's called a tip pool, and it's becoming standard practice in many restaurants. "It happens often that if someone leaves a voluntary tip (for their server), a significant portion of that money is going to other people," Zagor says.
According to federal law, only employees who customarily receive tips -- wait staff, hosts, bartenders and bussers -- can participate in the tip pool. But sometimes management takes a cut. In 2006, waitstaff from the Hilltop Steak House in Saugus, Mass., won $2.5 million in damages after complaining that managers dipped into their tips.
Mandatory gratuities are also divvied up. At high-end restaurants such as New York City's Per Se and Napa Valley's French Laundry, both owned by chef Thomas Keller, the practice is called service compris.
"The 20% service charge is clearly stated on the menu, and it's equally divided among the staff," says a spokesperson for both restaurants. Though the tip pool is designed to foster a team environment among staff, for customers it means something else entirely: that your gratuity isn't specifically rewarding the waiter or sommelier who provided you with exemplary service.
10. "Never go out to eat on a Monday."
If you think that Monday, when restaurants tend not to be crowded, is a great time to eat out, think again. "You're being served all of the weekend's leftovers," says Francis, the exposé co-author. Kitchens prepare food on a first-in, first-out basis, meaning whatever is oldest gets served first. It's a way to ensure that everything on the menu is as fresh as possible.
The system works great most days, but it can run into a little glitch over the weekend. Distributors typically take Sunday off and make their last deliveries Saturday morning, which means that by Monday any food not used over the weekend is at least three to four days old. And it will be served before the same ingredients arriving in Monday's delivery.
What to do if you wish to dine out on a Monday? Ignore your instincts and go to a place that's perpetually crowded. "If you are open 24/7 and busy all the time," says New York chef Lucia Calvete, "all your ingredients are fresh all the time."
This article was reported and written by Christine Bockelman for SmartMoney.
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
Thanks for the song...
Thanks to 2 members of my extended family, I now have a song stuck in my head! I guess there are worse things to have stuck in your head. Usually, I have stuff like T1 rates and integrated T1 engineering info stuck in there. Oh well.
For the enjoyment of the rest of you, here's what's stuck. Hey! At least it's not "It's a Small World".
Title of that little diddy is "Let's Make a Baby King". This version is by Michael English. Maybe this Christmas we'll get the hear the 2 particular people who got it stuck in my head do their own version! (Hint. Hint.)
}Davoice
For the enjoyment of the rest of you, here's what's stuck. Hey! At least it's not "It's a Small World".
Title of that little diddy is "Let's Make a Baby King". This version is by Michael English. Maybe this Christmas we'll get the hear the 2 particular people who got it stuck in my head do their own version! (Hint. Hint.)
}Davoice
Thursday, June 14, 2007
Sick Children, Working Moms
Ellen Bravo, The Nation
Teachers tell researchers they've never seen so many children coming to school sick. Guilt-ridden mothers share stories of sending ailing kids to day care or school out of fear that staying home with them would result in discipline on the job.
These stories don't surprise me. But what was startling was hearing how many kids drag themselves to school sick to keep a parent from losing pay or getting fired.
I first became aware of this three years ago at a 9to5 leadership conference in Washington, DC. Members were getting ready to tell their elected officials why they need paid sick days--something half the workforce, and three-quarters of low-wage women, do not have. For these workers, staying home to care for one's own illness or a sick family member could mean not only loss of pay, but loss of a job.
First I stopped by the group from Wisconsin and heard Robbie Bickerstaff describe how her son Eric, then age 7, got hit by a car on the way home from school but chose not to tell her for fear she'd lose her second-shift job if she didn't go in to work. Later an older sibling called her to say that Eric was crying because his arm hurt from being hit by the car and she had to take him to the hospital. When Robbie informed her boss, he was adamant: "Leave and you're fired." Her pleas didn't move him. She did leave; she was fired. Eric turned out to have a broken arm.
I moved on to the 9to5 members from Pennsylvania and shared Robbie's story. Carissa Peppard, the 21-year-old daughter of activist Kiki Peppard, was sitting next to her mom. "I've never told my mother this before," she said, "but when you're a kid, you know everything. Whenever I was sick, I'd ask myself, 'Should I tell Mom? Will we have groceries this week if she stays home with me?' If I could, I just dragged myself to school."
I related these stories recently at a briefing for Congressional staff organized by 9to5. Among the recommendations that came out of that briefing was support for the Healthy Families Act. On the panel with me was Jeannetta Allen, an energetic 18-year-old with a disability that affects her balance and her speech. She'd just testified how lack of paid sick days had cost her mother a job.
"I'm that kid," Jeannetta said when I'd finished. "After my mother was fired, I always tried to go to school no matter how I felt. I didn't want her to be fired again."
A chain reaction started among 9to5 members in the audience. One after another, they told stories of discovering a child was walking around with bruised ribs or the flu or strep throat because staying home meant Mom could lose her job.
"My son had stopped eating," Christina said. "He thought it would save on groceries."
Nearly twenty years ago, a Wisconsin coalition brought a group of children to Madison, Wisconsin, to fight for a state family and medical leave bill. They represented the range of reasons children might need a loved one by their side--childhood cancer, being adopted, death of a grandparent, having a sibling with a developmental disability or asthma, being hit by a car. After listening to the kids' stories, the Secretary of Employment Relations was visibly moved. "You know," he told them, "we're so used to dealing with lobbyists, we forget about those who are affected by our legislation."
Too many elected officials are preaching family values but listening to lobbyists who want those values to end at the workplace door.
It's time we listened to the children instead.
Teachers tell researchers they've never seen so many children coming to school sick. Guilt-ridden mothers share stories of sending ailing kids to day care or school out of fear that staying home with them would result in discipline on the job.
These stories don't surprise me. But what was startling was hearing how many kids drag themselves to school sick to keep a parent from losing pay or getting fired.
I first became aware of this three years ago at a 9to5 leadership conference in Washington, DC. Members were getting ready to tell their elected officials why they need paid sick days--something half the workforce, and three-quarters of low-wage women, do not have. For these workers, staying home to care for one's own illness or a sick family member could mean not only loss of pay, but loss of a job.
First I stopped by the group from Wisconsin and heard Robbie Bickerstaff describe how her son Eric, then age 7, got hit by a car on the way home from school but chose not to tell her for fear she'd lose her second-shift job if she didn't go in to work. Later an older sibling called her to say that Eric was crying because his arm hurt from being hit by the car and she had to take him to the hospital. When Robbie informed her boss, he was adamant: "Leave and you're fired." Her pleas didn't move him. She did leave; she was fired. Eric turned out to have a broken arm.
I moved on to the 9to5 members from Pennsylvania and shared Robbie's story. Carissa Peppard, the 21-year-old daughter of activist Kiki Peppard, was sitting next to her mom. "I've never told my mother this before," she said, "but when you're a kid, you know everything. Whenever I was sick, I'd ask myself, 'Should I tell Mom? Will we have groceries this week if she stays home with me?' If I could, I just dragged myself to school."
I related these stories recently at a briefing for Congressional staff organized by 9to5. Among the recommendations that came out of that briefing was support for the Healthy Families Act. On the panel with me was Jeannetta Allen, an energetic 18-year-old with a disability that affects her balance and her speech. She'd just testified how lack of paid sick days had cost her mother a job.
"I'm that kid," Jeannetta said when I'd finished. "After my mother was fired, I always tried to go to school no matter how I felt. I didn't want her to be fired again."
A chain reaction started among 9to5 members in the audience. One after another, they told stories of discovering a child was walking around with bruised ribs or the flu or strep throat because staying home meant Mom could lose her job.
"My son had stopped eating," Christina said. "He thought it would save on groceries."
Nearly twenty years ago, a Wisconsin coalition brought a group of children to Madison, Wisconsin, to fight for a state family and medical leave bill. They represented the range of reasons children might need a loved one by their side--childhood cancer, being adopted, death of a grandparent, having a sibling with a developmental disability or asthma, being hit by a car. After listening to the kids' stories, the Secretary of Employment Relations was visibly moved. "You know," he told them, "we're so used to dealing with lobbyists, we forget about those who are affected by our legislation."
Too many elected officials are preaching family values but listening to lobbyists who want those values to end at the workplace door.
It's time we listened to the children instead.
Monday, June 04, 2007
Church Cancelled, Service Begins
Across the country, churches are closing their doors on Sunday mornings to serve their communities through the new four-week churchwide campaign called Faith in Action. Will you join them?
By Heather Johnson
Curtis Lake thought the flood of 1996—when eight inches of water filled his suburban home—was disastrous. But what the first week of November 2006 brought him and the other residents of Sumner, Wash., turned out to be much worse. Nearly 10 inches of rain fell on the town of 10,000 just south of Seattle. Seven rivers flooded. Streets filled with mud and silt. And this time, Lake’s belongings sat under 18 inches of water. Also destroyed were 33 of the 41 mobile homes of River Park Estates, the senior living park he manages.
“We lost everything,” Lake says. “And most of the residents just left.”
But, to his surprise and relief, help arrived. Nearby Calvary Community Church (cccsumner.org) had cancelled that weekend’s services to head out and serve the community as part of a new four-week churchwide campaign called Faith in Action. Little did the congregation know their service weekend would be so well-timed; Sumner had never needed so much help.
Early on that Saturday morning, a forlorn Lake stood surveying the damage at the River Park Estates’ front gate, when more than 250 volunteers “just started showing up,” he recalls. Volunteers set out to save salvageable items by removing mud and sifting through personal belongings. Clean-up crews from the church eventually emptied 49 trash dumpsters of debris collected at the mobile home park.
“You know, Calvary was just an absolute God-send,” says Lake, who now chats with the church’s associate pastor on a regular basis. “I saw those people there to help, and it was like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders.”
Demonstrating Christian service is the heart of the Faith in Action campaign created by leading Christian publisher Zondervan (zondervan.com), Christian relief organization World Vision (worldvision.org) and church communications firm Outreach Inc. (outreach.com) [parent company of Outreach magazine]. The three organizations have put together a name and program to a movement that has been gaining momentum for more than a decade, starting with pioneers like Vineyard Cincinnati founder Steve Sjogren’s servant evangelism ministry (servantevangelism.com) and Fellowship Bible Church in Little Rock, Ark. (fbclr.org), with Pastor Robert Lewis. Eighteen years ago, Lewis led a focused, churchwide reorganization to make serving the community a core value of the church.
Faith in Action focuses a congregation’s attention on local, national and global needs, as well as God’s heart for service. For a full month, sermons and worship services, small group discussions and daily devotional readings, all lay the foundation for the campaign’s culminating event—“Faith in Action Sunday” community service project(s) and the corresponding cancellation of regular worship services. Moreover, the campaign also has an intentional outreach focus, where unchurched friends and community members are invited to join in the volunteer efforts, serving alongside church members.
It has been said that the unchurched don’t care about what Christians know until they know that Christians care. And to that, Calvary Community and many other U.S. churches are saying OK, we’ll show you by putting our faith into action.
Following the leader
“I asked why in the world we’d want to go through the trouble of putting our faith into action when it involved risk, reaching out, and rearranging schedules and resources,” says Jeffrey Olsen of Grace Community Church in Wesley Chapel, Fla. (exploregrace.com). “And of course, the answer is in the person of Jesus,” he told his church of 75 on the first Sunday of its Faith in Action campaign. The first week’s message, titled “Detour,” kicked off with a sermon warning people that their regular schedules would be interrupted if they choose to commit to serving.
“Two thousand years ago when Jesus came to earth, He was the only person who was able to both fully love God with His whole heart and also to fully love His neighbor as Himself,” says Olsen. “And although He was the Son of God, He made himself vulnerable and entered a world of risk, pain and hurt.”
A congregation will only take serving their community as seriously as their leader takes it, says World Vision Vice President Steve Haas. This is why the Faith in Action campaign begins from the pulpit.
“As is true in most community endeavors that have any sustaining value, it is the leader’s exhortation and example that moves people to obedience. Jesus’ rabbinical methodology was ‘Let me teach you ... let me show you ... let me watch you do it yourself,’ ” explains Haas. “The pulpit message and affirmation from the leader of the church’s spiritual life are critical ingredients in moving a congregation to biblical faithfulness.”
It made Olsen’s congregation move. On Sunday, Feb. 4, 15 Grace Community groups—nearly 90% of the church’s average attendance—built picnic tables for a foster home, cooked and served meals to young mothers at a crisis pregnancy center and landscaped a local school, among other acts of service in their neighborhood.
However, while some pastors may advocate cancelling Sunday or weekend church services to “be the Church” in their community, many leaders have encountered some internal opposition to the unconventional concept.
“We didn’t have any pushback from church leaders, but we did from some members who had a hard time understanding that we were worshipping through our actions,” explains Stacy Armstrong, community development director at Calvary Community. “Cancelling church is a huge deal. Senior pastors have to be behind it. They have to be the driving force.”
Other churches have chosen not to cancel services, but rather dedicate Saturday and Sunday—after church—to serving. And 50-member Faith Mennonite Church in Hutchinson, Kan., took a different route, offering a special worship service during its normal Sunday school hour before heading out to serve. The church discovered that Sunday morning is actually the most opportune time to serve at the local laundromat; that’s when the most people are there. Participants helped moms fold clothes and entertain children.
Allowing personal transformation
Throughout the four-week campaign, participants complete daily devotions to challenge their current perceptions of the needy and vulnerable, and encourage actions that live out Jesus’ words.
The second week of the devotional, titled “Lens,” asks participants if their view of the world is like Christ’s. Heidi McAdams, a member of Calvary Community, knew her answer immediately after reading Luke 6:30: “Give to everyone who asks you, and if anyone takes what belongs to you, do not demand it back.”
McAdams had always avoided eye contact with the homeless man standing on the corner she passed every day on her way to work. “I would think, Oh, he only wants money for cigarettes, or alcohol, or even worse, drugs,” she says. “I’d slide my hand over and make sure all the car doors were locked, then breathe a sigh of relief when the light turned green and I could go.”
After working through the judgments, fears and challenges of servanthood, both individually and with her small group, McAdams couldn’t help but change her perception. “I realized I had been very narrow-minded about the homeless people who stand on the corner. God wanted to open my eyes and heart,” she says.
And He succeeded. For her service project ironically, McAdams was assigned to a local ministry to homeless people called the Dream Center. There she prepared food, and even ate and fellowshipped with them.
“After that, I knew I would never look at the man on the corner the same way. Next time, I can share a blanket or food,” says McAdams. “Now I ask, ‘God, help me to see what you see.’ ”
This kind of transformation is exactly what Calvary Community’s Armstrong hoped for. “Through the curriculum, light bulbs are coming on,” she says. “People are realizing that we have to ask for forgiveness first, and then if we love God, we have to serve others.”
Strengthening servanthood through groups
Once a week, Faith in Action small groups meet in homes to discuss what they heard on Sunday morning, as well as what they’re learning during their personal devotions. They also work through the week’s DVD-based curriculum and discussion questions in the Faith in Action workbook and engage in corresponding activities that help define local and global needs.
For example, during the second week, groups learn that 29 million children in the United States are growing up in low-income families. According to the National Center for Children in Poverty, a family of four must earn an annual income of $40,000—twice the federal poverty level—just to provide their children with the essentials of food, housing and health care. And more than 880,000 people over the age of 25 earned at or below the minimum wage in 2005. So, Faith in Action small groups break up into pairs, which then pretend to be parents of two children: Sarah, 8 and Brett, 6. Both parents work full time, but their combined annual income is only $23,000—not enough to pay for rent, utilities, car insurance, gas, childcare, allergy medicine, etc. The question for Faith in Action participants becomes: How does this exercise challenge my assumptions about people in need?
In addition to completing activities like this one, the small group setting gives church members the opportunity to invite their unchurched friends into a neutral environment to talk about helping others—a topic of universal appeal—as well as share the motivation behind their community service.
Stefanie Alberts and her husband, Gary, group leaders for the Faith in Action campaign at Mission Hills Church in San Marcos, Calif. (missionhillschurch.org), experienced this firsthand.
The Albertses invited two couples they work with at their chiropractic practice to join their group—one couple, the Theismans, were unchurched, yet they agreed to come. Then the Albertses asked a neighbor couple, who, although members of Mission Hills, were not active in the church. Not only did the four couples become fast friends, they also energized each other to serve by sharing their fears and hesitations about serving, as well as their successes.
“I’ve always been the guy in back, not liking much attention,” says Doug Reich, one of the group members who works with the Albertses. “But I’ve learned that you don’t have to be a Billy Graham, a movie star or a model in order to change someone’s life. I love the Gospel because of that.”
To make a difference, you can take a widow out to lunch, like Stefanie and Dee Theisman did. Or you can stay later at work—without pay—and help a boss in a wheelchair, like Pam, another group member, did. Sharing stories like these became part of the group’s regular meetings.
“Through our actions, we’re throwing pebbles in the water, and God will help make the ripples,” says Stefanie.
The solidarity built within the Albertses group will also make lasting ripples in the members’ daily lives.
“My Faith in Action group has really allowed me to open up. When we started meeting, I was struggling with clinical depression. But these friendships have helped me face some things I would never have had the courage to face,” says Richard Theisman. “I think now my charter is to reach out and help others who are suffering from depression.”
In addition to that, he and Dee went to church at Mission Hills on Easter Sunday.
Doing what we’re told
On March 25, San Marcos Elementary School in San Marcos, Calif., swarmed with volunteers young and old, painting, weeding, landscaping, cleaning playground equipment, sanitizing the cafeteria, and much more.
“It was just so great!” says the school’s assistant principal, Stephanie Wallace. “To see the community involved in our school is so exciting.”
The project initially began nearly three months ago when Mission Hills’ Pastor of Ministries Carlos Sales stopped by the school in the early days of planning the new church plant’s Faith in Action campaign. He asked Wallace what his congregation could do for the school. The list was endless—or so she thought. But on their service day, some 200 Mission Hills Faith in Action volunteers completed the planned projects within two hours and began doing more than what Wallace had asked.
While Mission Hills volunteers transformed the rundown school, many of the students looked on from the nearby soccer field where their fathers were playing in a community soccer league game. “The kids were wondering what was happening at their school,” explains Wallace. “When they came back on Monday, we got to tell them that all these people pulled together to help make the school better.”
As Mission Hills transitioned from its mother church campus to its first building, the service day fueled more momentum for the new church, which had already grown to 900 adults. “We didn’t want to move into this community and say, ‘Hey, come to us.’ I wanted to enter the community with the DNA of service, saying, ‘We’re here to be part of the community and serve,’ ” says Sales.
But an integral part of Faith in Action’s serving is also mobilizing those outside of the church. Grace Community in Wesley Chapel, Fla., found that its service day impacted many more than just volunteers and those they served.
Wanting to include the community, the church intentionally partnered with area schools in advance. An entire school PTA helped the church collect donations of food for the hungry—500 pounds of non-perishables. And several classes at another school collected donations for Grace Community to assemble AIDS Caregiver Kits on service Sunday.
“Even though we’re a smaller church and didn’t have a lot of people on our big service day, there were a lot more people in the community who felt like they were part of what we were doing,” explains Grace Community’s Olsen.
Across the country, churches’ campaigns are ending with action, as volunteers actually do what God commands. “The success of a church’s spiritual enterprise is never that sanctuary seats are filled, services are orderly or that the sermon packs power,” explains World Vision’s Haas. “God measures impact based on faithfulness to His directives, obedience to His promptings, sensitivity to His Spirit. A church must ‘not merely listen to the Word,’ but instead ‘do what it says.’ ”
Making service a lifestyle
“We surveyed our participants, and 100% said they would do Faith in Action again,” says Armstrong of Calvary Community. “We have to do this again. We have to make service a lifestyle.”
To that end, the church not only plans to organize more campaigns, it will also require all of its leaders and participants to sign a form committing to following up with those they serve.
Curtis Lake and his wife are still recovering from the November flood that hit Sumner, Wash. They moved into one of the remaining mobile homes, but Lake says they won’t soon forget what Calvary Community did for them. In fact, a couple of women who had helped him in November stopped by a few days before Christmas to drop off gift certificates.
And, hopefully, all those who have served nationwide will also not quickly forget the campaign’s power. “I think this experience definitely gave me a glimpse of God’s grace—the grace He has extended to me, and the grace I need to extend to people,” McAdams says. She and her family now regularly head to downtown Seattle to serve food to the homeless. “I want my more positive perspective to be ‘caught’ by my kids,” she says.
Ultimately, Faith in Action is not just a four-week campaign, but a way of living each day. “The church service day was great, but it was pretty easy and not really that intimidating. We could sign up for an hour or two and work with a lot of people we knew,” explains Stefanie Alberts. “The situations that aren’t planned though ... going up to someone and filling their need instantly—whether that be giving a water bottle to a homeless person or even talking to the person you don’t want to talk to—is a bigger challenge and is really what Faith in Action has equipped us to do.”
Heather Johnson is managing editor for Outreach magazine.
The churches interviewed for this piece participated in the Faith in Action pilot program in late 2006 and early 2007. The official campaign material for Faith in Action will be available mid-May 2007.
Getting Started
The Faith in Action churchwide campaign is available to churches at any time, but many are planning to participate on what is being called National Faith in Action Sunday, Oct. 14, 2007. Here’s how to get started:
1. Request a free information kit at putyourfaithinaction.org.
2. If this campaign is right for your church, purchase a Faith in Action Campaign Kit for $49.95.
3. Allow four to 12 weeks for the planning and preparation of your Faith in Action campaign, services and projects. The larger the scope of your campaign, the more time you will need.
4. Using the campaign’s instructive manual, plan and prepare. The campaign planning kit includes sermons, sermon video clips, service project planning guide, promotion suggestions and other resources, as well as samples of all the small group and leader materials.
5. Have sign ups. Based on the number of participants, recruit the necessary number of small group leaders.
6. Order the appropriate amount of small group participant and leader materials.
7. Gather information about potential service projects, and select those that will meet the biggest need, but are also feasible for your church’s size.
8. Share your Faith in Action learnings and ideas with other churches at putyourfaithinaction.org.
-EXCERPTED from Outreach magazine, "Features," May/June 2007
By Heather Johnson
Curtis Lake thought the flood of 1996—when eight inches of water filled his suburban home—was disastrous. But what the first week of November 2006 brought him and the other residents of Sumner, Wash., turned out to be much worse. Nearly 10 inches of rain fell on the town of 10,000 just south of Seattle. Seven rivers flooded. Streets filled with mud and silt. And this time, Lake’s belongings sat under 18 inches of water. Also destroyed were 33 of the 41 mobile homes of River Park Estates, the senior living park he manages.
“We lost everything,” Lake says. “And most of the residents just left.”
But, to his surprise and relief, help arrived. Nearby Calvary Community Church (cccsumner.org) had cancelled that weekend’s services to head out and serve the community as part of a new four-week churchwide campaign called Faith in Action. Little did the congregation know their service weekend would be so well-timed; Sumner had never needed so much help.
Early on that Saturday morning, a forlorn Lake stood surveying the damage at the River Park Estates’ front gate, when more than 250 volunteers “just started showing up,” he recalls. Volunteers set out to save salvageable items by removing mud and sifting through personal belongings. Clean-up crews from the church eventually emptied 49 trash dumpsters of debris collected at the mobile home park.
“You know, Calvary was just an absolute God-send,” says Lake, who now chats with the church’s associate pastor on a regular basis. “I saw those people there to help, and it was like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders.”
Demonstrating Christian service is the heart of the Faith in Action campaign created by leading Christian publisher Zondervan (zondervan.com), Christian relief organization World Vision (worldvision.org) and church communications firm Outreach Inc. (outreach.com) [parent company of Outreach magazine]. The three organizations have put together a name and program to a movement that has been gaining momentum for more than a decade, starting with pioneers like Vineyard Cincinnati founder Steve Sjogren’s servant evangelism ministry (servantevangelism.com) and Fellowship Bible Church in Little Rock, Ark. (fbclr.org), with Pastor Robert Lewis. Eighteen years ago, Lewis led a focused, churchwide reorganization to make serving the community a core value of the church.
Faith in Action focuses a congregation’s attention on local, national and global needs, as well as God’s heart for service. For a full month, sermons and worship services, small group discussions and daily devotional readings, all lay the foundation for the campaign’s culminating event—“Faith in Action Sunday” community service project(s) and the corresponding cancellation of regular worship services. Moreover, the campaign also has an intentional outreach focus, where unchurched friends and community members are invited to join in the volunteer efforts, serving alongside church members.
It has been said that the unchurched don’t care about what Christians know until they know that Christians care. And to that, Calvary Community and many other U.S. churches are saying OK, we’ll show you by putting our faith into action.
Following the leader
“I asked why in the world we’d want to go through the trouble of putting our faith into action when it involved risk, reaching out, and rearranging schedules and resources,” says Jeffrey Olsen of Grace Community Church in Wesley Chapel, Fla. (exploregrace.com). “And of course, the answer is in the person of Jesus,” he told his church of 75 on the first Sunday of its Faith in Action campaign. The first week’s message, titled “Detour,” kicked off with a sermon warning people that their regular schedules would be interrupted if they choose to commit to serving.
“Two thousand years ago when Jesus came to earth, He was the only person who was able to both fully love God with His whole heart and also to fully love His neighbor as Himself,” says Olsen. “And although He was the Son of God, He made himself vulnerable and entered a world of risk, pain and hurt.”
A congregation will only take serving their community as seriously as their leader takes it, says World Vision Vice President Steve Haas. This is why the Faith in Action campaign begins from the pulpit.
“As is true in most community endeavors that have any sustaining value, it is the leader’s exhortation and example that moves people to obedience. Jesus’ rabbinical methodology was ‘Let me teach you ... let me show you ... let me watch you do it yourself,’ ” explains Haas. “The pulpit message and affirmation from the leader of the church’s spiritual life are critical ingredients in moving a congregation to biblical faithfulness.”
It made Olsen’s congregation move. On Sunday, Feb. 4, 15 Grace Community groups—nearly 90% of the church’s average attendance—built picnic tables for a foster home, cooked and served meals to young mothers at a crisis pregnancy center and landscaped a local school, among other acts of service in their neighborhood.
However, while some pastors may advocate cancelling Sunday or weekend church services to “be the Church” in their community, many leaders have encountered some internal opposition to the unconventional concept.
“We didn’t have any pushback from church leaders, but we did from some members who had a hard time understanding that we were worshipping through our actions,” explains Stacy Armstrong, community development director at Calvary Community. “Cancelling church is a huge deal. Senior pastors have to be behind it. They have to be the driving force.”
Other churches have chosen not to cancel services, but rather dedicate Saturday and Sunday—after church—to serving. And 50-member Faith Mennonite Church in Hutchinson, Kan., took a different route, offering a special worship service during its normal Sunday school hour before heading out to serve. The church discovered that Sunday morning is actually the most opportune time to serve at the local laundromat; that’s when the most people are there. Participants helped moms fold clothes and entertain children.
Allowing personal transformation
Throughout the four-week campaign, participants complete daily devotions to challenge their current perceptions of the needy and vulnerable, and encourage actions that live out Jesus’ words.
The second week of the devotional, titled “Lens,” asks participants if their view of the world is like Christ’s. Heidi McAdams, a member of Calvary Community, knew her answer immediately after reading Luke 6:30: “Give to everyone who asks you, and if anyone takes what belongs to you, do not demand it back.”
McAdams had always avoided eye contact with the homeless man standing on the corner she passed every day on her way to work. “I would think, Oh, he only wants money for cigarettes, or alcohol, or even worse, drugs,” she says. “I’d slide my hand over and make sure all the car doors were locked, then breathe a sigh of relief when the light turned green and I could go.”
After working through the judgments, fears and challenges of servanthood, both individually and with her small group, McAdams couldn’t help but change her perception. “I realized I had been very narrow-minded about the homeless people who stand on the corner. God wanted to open my eyes and heart,” she says.
And He succeeded. For her service project ironically, McAdams was assigned to a local ministry to homeless people called the Dream Center. There she prepared food, and even ate and fellowshipped with them.
“After that, I knew I would never look at the man on the corner the same way. Next time, I can share a blanket or food,” says McAdams. “Now I ask, ‘God, help me to see what you see.’ ”
This kind of transformation is exactly what Calvary Community’s Armstrong hoped for. “Through the curriculum, light bulbs are coming on,” she says. “People are realizing that we have to ask for forgiveness first, and then if we love God, we have to serve others.”
Strengthening servanthood through groups
Once a week, Faith in Action small groups meet in homes to discuss what they heard on Sunday morning, as well as what they’re learning during their personal devotions. They also work through the week’s DVD-based curriculum and discussion questions in the Faith in Action workbook and engage in corresponding activities that help define local and global needs.
For example, during the second week, groups learn that 29 million children in the United States are growing up in low-income families. According to the National Center for Children in Poverty, a family of four must earn an annual income of $40,000—twice the federal poverty level—just to provide their children with the essentials of food, housing and health care. And more than 880,000 people over the age of 25 earned at or below the minimum wage in 2005. So, Faith in Action small groups break up into pairs, which then pretend to be parents of two children: Sarah, 8 and Brett, 6. Both parents work full time, but their combined annual income is only $23,000—not enough to pay for rent, utilities, car insurance, gas, childcare, allergy medicine, etc. The question for Faith in Action participants becomes: How does this exercise challenge my assumptions about people in need?
In addition to completing activities like this one, the small group setting gives church members the opportunity to invite their unchurched friends into a neutral environment to talk about helping others—a topic of universal appeal—as well as share the motivation behind their community service.
Stefanie Alberts and her husband, Gary, group leaders for the Faith in Action campaign at Mission Hills Church in San Marcos, Calif. (missionhillschurch.org), experienced this firsthand.
The Albertses invited two couples they work with at their chiropractic practice to join their group—one couple, the Theismans, were unchurched, yet they agreed to come. Then the Albertses asked a neighbor couple, who, although members of Mission Hills, were not active in the church. Not only did the four couples become fast friends, they also energized each other to serve by sharing their fears and hesitations about serving, as well as their successes.
“I’ve always been the guy in back, not liking much attention,” says Doug Reich, one of the group members who works with the Albertses. “But I’ve learned that you don’t have to be a Billy Graham, a movie star or a model in order to change someone’s life. I love the Gospel because of that.”
To make a difference, you can take a widow out to lunch, like Stefanie and Dee Theisman did. Or you can stay later at work—without pay—and help a boss in a wheelchair, like Pam, another group member, did. Sharing stories like these became part of the group’s regular meetings.
“Through our actions, we’re throwing pebbles in the water, and God will help make the ripples,” says Stefanie.
The solidarity built within the Albertses group will also make lasting ripples in the members’ daily lives.
“My Faith in Action group has really allowed me to open up. When we started meeting, I was struggling with clinical depression. But these friendships have helped me face some things I would never have had the courage to face,” says Richard Theisman. “I think now my charter is to reach out and help others who are suffering from depression.”
In addition to that, he and Dee went to church at Mission Hills on Easter Sunday.
Doing what we’re told
On March 25, San Marcos Elementary School in San Marcos, Calif., swarmed with volunteers young and old, painting, weeding, landscaping, cleaning playground equipment, sanitizing the cafeteria, and much more.
“It was just so great!” says the school’s assistant principal, Stephanie Wallace. “To see the community involved in our school is so exciting.”
The project initially began nearly three months ago when Mission Hills’ Pastor of Ministries Carlos Sales stopped by the school in the early days of planning the new church plant’s Faith in Action campaign. He asked Wallace what his congregation could do for the school. The list was endless—or so she thought. But on their service day, some 200 Mission Hills Faith in Action volunteers completed the planned projects within two hours and began doing more than what Wallace had asked.
While Mission Hills volunteers transformed the rundown school, many of the students looked on from the nearby soccer field where their fathers were playing in a community soccer league game. “The kids were wondering what was happening at their school,” explains Wallace. “When they came back on Monday, we got to tell them that all these people pulled together to help make the school better.”
As Mission Hills transitioned from its mother church campus to its first building, the service day fueled more momentum for the new church, which had already grown to 900 adults. “We didn’t want to move into this community and say, ‘Hey, come to us.’ I wanted to enter the community with the DNA of service, saying, ‘We’re here to be part of the community and serve,’ ” says Sales.
But an integral part of Faith in Action’s serving is also mobilizing those outside of the church. Grace Community in Wesley Chapel, Fla., found that its service day impacted many more than just volunteers and those they served.
Wanting to include the community, the church intentionally partnered with area schools in advance. An entire school PTA helped the church collect donations of food for the hungry—500 pounds of non-perishables. And several classes at another school collected donations for Grace Community to assemble AIDS Caregiver Kits on service Sunday.
“Even though we’re a smaller church and didn’t have a lot of people on our big service day, there were a lot more people in the community who felt like they were part of what we were doing,” explains Grace Community’s Olsen.
Across the country, churches’ campaigns are ending with action, as volunteers actually do what God commands. “The success of a church’s spiritual enterprise is never that sanctuary seats are filled, services are orderly or that the sermon packs power,” explains World Vision’s Haas. “God measures impact based on faithfulness to His directives, obedience to His promptings, sensitivity to His Spirit. A church must ‘not merely listen to the Word,’ but instead ‘do what it says.’ ”
Making service a lifestyle
“We surveyed our participants, and 100% said they would do Faith in Action again,” says Armstrong of Calvary Community. “We have to do this again. We have to make service a lifestyle.”
To that end, the church not only plans to organize more campaigns, it will also require all of its leaders and participants to sign a form committing to following up with those they serve.
Curtis Lake and his wife are still recovering from the November flood that hit Sumner, Wash. They moved into one of the remaining mobile homes, but Lake says they won’t soon forget what Calvary Community did for them. In fact, a couple of women who had helped him in November stopped by a few days before Christmas to drop off gift certificates.
And, hopefully, all those who have served nationwide will also not quickly forget the campaign’s power. “I think this experience definitely gave me a glimpse of God’s grace—the grace He has extended to me, and the grace I need to extend to people,” McAdams says. She and her family now regularly head to downtown Seattle to serve food to the homeless. “I want my more positive perspective to be ‘caught’ by my kids,” she says.
Ultimately, Faith in Action is not just a four-week campaign, but a way of living each day. “The church service day was great, but it was pretty easy and not really that intimidating. We could sign up for an hour or two and work with a lot of people we knew,” explains Stefanie Alberts. “The situations that aren’t planned though ... going up to someone and filling their need instantly—whether that be giving a water bottle to a homeless person or even talking to the person you don’t want to talk to—is a bigger challenge and is really what Faith in Action has equipped us to do.”
Heather Johnson is managing editor for Outreach magazine.
The churches interviewed for this piece participated in the Faith in Action pilot program in late 2006 and early 2007. The official campaign material for Faith in Action will be available mid-May 2007.
Getting Started
The Faith in Action churchwide campaign is available to churches at any time, but many are planning to participate on what is being called National Faith in Action Sunday, Oct. 14, 2007. Here’s how to get started:
1. Request a free information kit at putyourfaithinaction.org.
2. If this campaign is right for your church, purchase a Faith in Action Campaign Kit for $49.95.
3. Allow four to 12 weeks for the planning and preparation of your Faith in Action campaign, services and projects. The larger the scope of your campaign, the more time you will need.
4. Using the campaign’s instructive manual, plan and prepare. The campaign planning kit includes sermons, sermon video clips, service project planning guide, promotion suggestions and other resources, as well as samples of all the small group and leader materials.
5. Have sign ups. Based on the number of participants, recruit the necessary number of small group leaders.
6. Order the appropriate amount of small group participant and leader materials.
7. Gather information about potential service projects, and select those that will meet the biggest need, but are also feasible for your church’s size.
8. Share your Faith in Action learnings and ideas with other churches at putyourfaithinaction.org.
-EXCERPTED from Outreach magazine, "Features," May/June 2007
Friday, June 01, 2007
Response to Angels and Applied Reasoning
Acts 12:1-18
So here's a weird one for you... When Peter's followers were praying for him to get out of jail and he showed up at the door of Mary, Mother of Mark, (b/c the Lord had already gotten him out of jail thanks to another angel), Rhoda didn't let him in b/c the others said "it must be his angel".
That's a rather nonchalant response to an angel at the door don't ya think? In every other biblical account of an angel appearing, the first response was fear and awe. Could it be that in the early church Angels appearing were commonplace in the period immediately proceeding Jesus' death?
Beyond that, how would they think his angel would look just like him? And if Peter had an angel that looked just like him, are we all assigned an angel that looks just like us? If we're assigned an angel that looks like us, does that mean satan originally looked like someone? Could he have appeared to Eve in the Garden as herself? Before the fall of the angels, was satan - as the chief angel - assigned to be Adam and/or Eve's angels? Could the disfigurement punishment meted out for him tempting them have been removing his ability to look like his assignee?
[Questions to which I don't have clear answers of course.]
So here's a weird one for you... When Peter's followers were praying for him to get out of jail and he showed up at the door of Mary, Mother of Mark, (b/c the Lord had already gotten him out of jail thanks to another angel), Rhoda didn't let him in b/c the others said "it must be his angel".
That's a rather nonchalant response to an angel at the door don't ya think? In every other biblical account of an angel appearing, the first response was fear and awe. Could it be that in the early church Angels appearing were commonplace in the period immediately proceeding Jesus' death?
Beyond that, how would they think his angel would look just like him? And if Peter had an angel that looked just like him, are we all assigned an angel that looks just like us? If we're assigned an angel that looks like us, does that mean satan originally looked like someone? Could he have appeared to Eve in the Garden as herself? Before the fall of the angels, was satan - as the chief angel - assigned to be Adam and/or Eve's angels? Could the disfigurement punishment meted out for him tempting them have been removing his ability to look like his assignee?
[Questions to which I don't have clear answers of course.]
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Houston, we have a problem - we all need new email addresses
Oh boy... here it comes. Now that Comcast has taken over the cable modem network in Houston from Road Runner, everyone needs a new email address. The @houston.rr.com domain will officially be killed at the end of the year.
To ease the switch, Comcast will be providing users with a “migration tool”. Haha. So you can move to an @comcast.net email address and have to change your email again the next time you change email providers.
If now isn't a good time to register your own domain and take control of your own email address destiny, I don't know when is. You can register a domain with 1&1 for $5.99 per year and you get free email account with up to 200 aliases. You can get 5 additional email accounts with 2GB of storage each for $0.99 per month. If you use a Windows Mobile device you can get an Outlook enabled account which includes Outlook Mobile Access for $6.99/mo.
Take this as an opportunity to get your own domain name and control your own email destiny. Once you own your domain name you'll never have to change your email address again.
To ease the switch, Comcast will be providing users with a “migration tool”. Haha. So you can move to an @comcast.net email address and have to change your email again the next time you change email providers.
If now isn't a good time to register your own domain and take control of your own email address destiny, I don't know when is. You can register a domain with 1&1 for $5.99 per year and you get free email account with up to 200 aliases. You can get 5 additional email accounts with 2GB of storage each for $0.99 per month. If you use a Windows Mobile device you can get an Outlook enabled account which includes Outlook Mobile Access for $6.99/mo.
Take this as an opportunity to get your own domain name and control your own email destiny. Once you own your domain name you'll never have to change your email address again.
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
Integrity Church - Dude You Got a New Website
Well... talk about a Cinderella story. Integrity Church in Burlington, North Carolina just went from this:
To this:
That's what I call a dramatic church website overhaul. The new design is definitely more in line with Integrity's stated purpose of being an innovative church in its region.
Read more about the new features and information about the new Integrity Church site here. They were previously hosted by a service called "ThisChurch" that provided the equivalent of web training wheels. They are now in complete control of their own website running a full Joomla CMS engine on 1&1 web hosting.
Thursday, May 24, 2007
Bird comments on Bush's politics...
Bird Sh*ts on Bush During Press Conference
"Seems a passing sparrow took an opportunity to weigh in on what the President had to say."
From ABC:
As President Bush took a question Thursday in the White House Rose Garden about scandals involving his Attorney General, he remarked, "I've got confidence in Al Gonzales doin' the job."
Simultaneously, a sparrow flew overhead and left a splash on the President's sleeve, which Bush tried several times to wipe off.
Deputy White House Press Secretary Dana Perino promptly put the incident through the proper spin cycle, telling ABC News, "It was his lucky day…everyone knows that's a sign of good luck."
"Seems a passing sparrow took an opportunity to weigh in on what the President had to say."
From ABC:
As President Bush took a question Thursday in the White House Rose Garden about scandals involving his Attorney General, he remarked, "I've got confidence in Al Gonzales doin' the job."
Simultaneously, a sparrow flew overhead and left a splash on the President's sleeve, which Bush tried several times to wipe off.
Deputy White House Press Secretary Dana Perino promptly put the incident through the proper spin cycle, telling ABC News, "It was his lucky day…everyone knows that's a sign of good luck."
Friday, May 18, 2007
What kind of web worker are you?
Excerpted from Web Worker Daily
The Digital Bedouin: This is the web worker that gets the most media attention, the roving nomad “able to set up shop wherever there is an Internet connection, chairs, tables, and sources of caffeine” and running a company or a consulting business on the go.
The Telecommuter: Unlike the digital bedouin, the telecommuter normally works from one fixed location, and is a full-time employee - it’s just that the location is (usually) home rather than office. Some people telecommute full-time, others combine telecommuting with some more traditional days in the office.
The Entrepreneur: Gone are the days when being self-employed meant drumming up business from your local community. Whether you’re selling t-shirts or accounting services, the web can give you global reach from your own home office.
The Corporate Web Worker: We think this is the most overlooked class of web workers: people in a traditional corporate setting, going into the office every day but still using the web to empower themselves and gain amazing productivity. If the web enables your job: you’re a web worker.
The Digital Bedouin: This is the web worker that gets the most media attention, the roving nomad “able to set up shop wherever there is an Internet connection, chairs, tables, and sources of caffeine” and running a company or a consulting business on the go.
The Telecommuter: Unlike the digital bedouin, the telecommuter normally works from one fixed location, and is a full-time employee - it’s just that the location is (usually) home rather than office. Some people telecommute full-time, others combine telecommuting with some more traditional days in the office.
The Entrepreneur: Gone are the days when being self-employed meant drumming up business from your local community. Whether you’re selling t-shirts or accounting services, the web can give you global reach from your own home office.
The Corporate Web Worker: We think this is the most overlooked class of web workers: people in a traditional corporate setting, going into the office every day but still using the web to empower themselves and gain amazing productivity. If the web enables your job: you’re a web worker.
Thursday, May 17, 2007
Covad ADSL2+ Service
Covad now offers business class ADSL2+ services in many of the popular areas of their footprint. The 8Mbps/1Mbps, 10Mbps/1Mbps and 15Mbps/1Mbps speeds are $149.95, $174.95 and $194.95, respectively. Service is available in 758 central offices across 11 markets.
The new ADSL2+ speeds are available in the following markets:
Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Philadelphia, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington DC.
Customers need to be within 4,000 feet of the CO to get the fastest 15Mbps service.
Covad also launched bonded T1 service in almost all of the markets. 3mbps symmetric T1 service - 2 T1s bonded together. As with any T1 product, there are no distance limitations but pricing is way higher than that of any DSL type product. T1 service includes very strong SLAs.
Pricing and availability are already loaded in the Anyion Services real-time quoting engine.
The new ADSL2+ speeds are available in the following markets:
Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Philadelphia, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington DC.
Customers need to be within 4,000 feet of the CO to get the fastest 15Mbps service.
Covad also launched bonded T1 service in almost all of the markets. 3mbps symmetric T1 service - 2 T1s bonded together. As with any T1 product, there are no distance limitations but pricing is way higher than that of any DSL type product. T1 service includes very strong SLAs.
Pricing and availability are already loaded in the Anyion Services real-time quoting engine.
Money changes... well... not much
What changed in his lifestyle after Warren Buffett made his first million? Not much. (better shoes)
What changed in his lifestyle after Warren Buffett made his first hundred million? Not much. (more people know his name)
What changed in his lifestyle after Warren Buffett made his first ten billion? Not much. (a personal Gulfstream jet.)
What changed in his lifestyle after Warren Buffett made his first hundred million? Not much. (more people know his name)
What changed in his lifestyle after Warren Buffett made his first ten billion? Not much. (a personal Gulfstream jet.)
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
GAO Says Homeland Security Is Breaking Privacy Laws
Not that anyone the Republican led side of the government actually listens to the General Accounting Office these days... but.
The latest from the GAO is a report noting that the Department of Homeland Security appears to be breaking privacy laws by not telling people how it uses personal information for people flying into and out of the country. With all of these efforts to set our elected officials straight, you'd think that people would hit back against these GAO reports. Unfortunately, it seems like they are almost universally ignored. It's great that the GAO seems to keep telling it like it is -- but when everyone ignores those reports to focus on industry approved talking points, are they really holding anyone accountable?
The latest from the GAO is a report noting that the Department of Homeland Security appears to be breaking privacy laws by not telling people how it uses personal information for people flying into and out of the country. With all of these efforts to set our elected officials straight, you'd think that people would hit back against these GAO reports. Unfortunately, it seems like they are almost universally ignored. It's great that the GAO seems to keep telling it like it is -- but when everyone ignores those reports to focus on industry approved talking points, are they really holding anyone accountable?
Saturday, May 12, 2007
Are you a human being or a human doing?
So here's a question to ponder. Are you a human being? Or have you evolved into a human doing?
Human doings are those who no longer enjoy doing what they are good at doing but yet fail to be good at doing what they enjoy.
Human doings are those who no longer enjoy doing what they are good at doing but yet fail to be good at doing what they enjoy.
Tuesday, May 08, 2007
Even the President Gets Hooked on Broadband
Once you have broadband, you never want to go back, which is presumably why the Air Force Air Mobility Command and the Defense Information Systems Agency are looking for commercial satellite communication firms to continue to provide high-speed Internet service on the fly to Air Force One and the other 17 planes that fly senior leaders around the world.
Boeing originally provided broadband to Air Force One via its commercial service that linked airlines to the Internet, but Boeing folded that business, called Connexion, last summer because of poor sales. However, Boeing continues to provide the broadband service to the Air Force VIP fleet, which transports the president, vice president and other pooh-bahs, including the secretaries of Defense, Homeland Security, State and top military commanders.
While internal Air Force budget documents indicate the service is satisfied with Boeing, whose airborne broadband contract runs through fiscal 2008, the Air Force's request for proposals seeks alternative suppliers capable of providing broadband voice, video, data and video teleconferencing services to the VIP fleet, with 50 or more users connected at the same time.
Besides the Boeing 747s which serve as Air Force One, the VIP fleet also consists of 757s, 737s and Gulfstream executive jets, with the bulk of the aircraft based at Andrews Air Force Base, Md.
DISA also intends to beef up VIP air fleet service through the specialized AT&T “Northstar” network, which provides T-1 circuits (1.54 megabytes per second) from a terrestrial network in the United States over UHF radios to Air Force One.
The Northstar network provides close-to-complete coverage for aircraft operating in the continental United States, according to a background paper from MITRE, but DISA wants to extend the network's reach and has awarded a sole-source contract to AT&T to provide on a 24-hour notice two teams of personnel and gear ready to install a temporary ground site wherever Air Force One or the command post aircraft travel.
While a T-1 circuit pales in comparison to the 5 megabytes-per-second service offered by Connexion, it’s good to know our leaders can still do some serious Web surfing and download a lot of PowerPoint slides (the digital glue of government) on the expanded Northstar network at 1.54 megabytes per second while zooming around at 35,000 feet.
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