Don't know if I've posted about this here before but on my website Ampbreia (before it became Ampbreia Reloaded) I sometimes commented on Islam and the Middle East because of my own experiences with both, though the site in general was and is devoted more to enjoyable things I'm interested in like art, music, books, the paranormal, and travel. In fact, at that time, I mentioned only in passing if at all. I'd begun the site as a place to host my recently published memoir, Lost in Foreign Passions.  This being the case, I was surprised by an E-mail from a Muslim Iranian man one morning regarding something or other I had said about hijab, he didn't say what.

"I think you should do some research on pheromones especially gaseous forms of pheromones. You will see a link there between pheromones and why women in Islam wear a hijab. Maybe then you can change your comments on such issues."

What was it I could have said about hijab? I scanned my very few comments on the subject as well as my book blurb and found that I'd only told about how it was for me.  It was uncomfortable, hot, and restrictive, I HATED wearing it, I'm certain it would drown me if I tried swimming in it, and it did not seem to improve the conduct of men in regard to my person. I had no intention of changing my perfectly truthful comments on the matter.

What I didn't say there - but should have - was the fact that, if anything, males behaved worse when all the women around them wore hijab. That was my personal experience. I have also compared notes with other women on the subject and they felt the pretty much the same way, all of us frequently experiencing cat calls and groping from orthodox Muslim males while we were in hijab. In comparison, such occasions were rare for us without hijab and among mostly non-Muslim males. Only a few of the women I've talked to say otherwise, and their particular circumstances have allowed for very little public exposure.  They were kept almost exclusively at home.

It seemed to me as if those Muslim males were making no effort to control themselves at all. Whenever they behaved badly, they would blame it on a woman for somehow being too alluring, never themselves for lacking self-control in any manner, shape or form.

I didn't bother answering the audacious male directly though I did dutifully scan the Internet for any such articles. There were LOTS, but none of the actual research articles I saw in any wise supported the concept of hijab.

The only place I did find the reference of pheromones with that of hijab logic was solely in the form of Islamic rationalizations, not research. It seems they think that a layering of veils on a woman is essential to subduing the pheromones they would otherwise give off, thus causing men to loose all control. I spent quite a lot of time chuckling over this.

What I found about pheromones in the research papers in a nutshell was that they are a biochemical form of communication between members of the same species. They can project, fear, excitement, anger, or predatory intent. They are a comfort ("I'm with you") signal between loved ones/family. They are also used to signal between males and females both sexual attraction and repulsion (if the two are lacking in the essential "chemistry"), oh yeah, and male pheromones are far more potent than a female's so really, if should be the men who had to wear the hijab.

Oooooh....!  I'm quite overcome with all male aroma, I'm going to go crazy or swoon or get all...  *AHEM*  How can I resist attacking you, tackling you right into the mud, when you waft that erotically enticing scent at me of eau de sweat and motor oil??? 

Oh my, is it just me or is it getting a little hot in here?  LOL.

Seriously though, my own opinion is that anyone who trusts their own instincts will realize the value of paying attention to genuine biochemical signals. For instance, an acquaintance of mine is a trauma counselor who deals with victims of violent assault by strangers. Something she has repeatedly noticed is that nearly every single one reported having had the strong feeling they were being stalked and yet overrode their own impulses to run away or avoid a certain area because they thought they were being silly. This fact carries with it two clear messages to me:

1. They weren't being silly; they were sensing the pheromones of a predator.

2. Pheromones are no excuse for the behavior of an intelligent being. The victims mentioned above sensed the predatory pheromones and chose not to react to them... although, in this case, they ought to have. In other words, a woman without a hijab on to stifle her pheromones is no excuse for a human male to lose control.

Having written some knowledgeable friends for an opinion about this, I got the following funny and interesting answer from an ex-Muslim Middle-Eastern man who'd immigrated to the U.S.:

No source for this... I saw it on a TV documentary of fairly high quality... Apparently the more similar some of our genetic structure is the less we like how each other smell. Damn can't remember the details.

As someone who has spent many a day naked with other adults and non-adults I can't remember ever seeing anyone overcome with lust either by the sight or smell of women or men (or dogs, horses etc).

My impression is that the more covered and secret sex is the more likely rape and loss of control through desire becomes... but that's just my guess. Excuse me but there is a strange aroma and I am feeling very horny....

Giggling even more now, I agreed with that impression of his. Being female, I can only surmise how men actually feel about this, but I do get the impression that quite a lot of them are more impulsively attracted by mystique than by the bald facts of nature as it were.

Another friend of mine, this one an Iranian woman, wrote:

"Well don't you remember how they forced the veil on the women of Iran in the first place? The interim Prime Minister Bani Sadr (at that point Khomeini did not have an official title yet) came on national television and said that women had to wear the compulsory hijab because and I quote 'women's hair has harmful rays irradiating from it that entice men.' Needless to say that the next day Iranian women were on the street protesting the statements of Bani Sadr, but their protests were curbed when a bunch of fanatics splashed acid on the faces of some of the women. This guy's explanation is along the same lines. It is interestingly to note that Prime Minister Bani Sadr had obtained his doctorate degree from Sorbonne University in France. I think the phrase "idiots with PhDs" fits perfectly here.

Your observation (about Muslim males lacking the self-discipline they are capable of) is certainly true. But what do you expect from someone who think women are constantly trying to entice him? His idea of female nudity is women showing too much forehead. He thinks a single strand of hair will entice him. He is not allowed to talk to even have a conversation with girls of his age because he thinks they will entice him. Poor guy probably gets an erection every time he hears a female voice. All his life he has been told that women are out to entice him with their hair. He has never been told that he needs to control his sexual urges and not get aroused by the mere presence of a woman in a room. Rather, he has been told that women are the real problem and if they don't want you to grope them then they need to cover themselves up from head to toe.

That [pheromone hijab logic] is the dumbest thing I have ever heard. First of all, pheromones have only been proven to control the timing of mating in insects and invertebrates. Some animals use them to signal danger to others, while other use pheromones to mark their territory. The only conclusive report on pheromones is that in human females, pheromones make menstruation cycles synchronous (i.e. if you live with or work with other women, their pheromones has an effect on the timing of your menstruation cycle). Pheromones are useless in humans, unless you are a woman and other people's pheromones keep screwing up your monthly cycle. But even if they did find a class of pheromones that has something to do with sexual attraction, to think that a veil could protect you from a woman's pheromones is preposterous. Pheromones are tiny little molecules that travel from organism to organism, much like viruses. How can a piece of cloth possibly keep them from getting dispersed into the air? Plus, if women in Islamic countries secrete pheromones, so do women in the West. But Western men don't act like baboons every time they see a woman with hair. What Western men have been immunized against female pheromones?

I feel like I should add that not all men think or act like described. I lived in Iran until I was 15 years old and although there certainly were men like that in there, the boys that I knew were perfectly normal. We talked, watched movies, went to parties, played soccer, played cards, and did our homework with the neighborhood boys without ever "enticing" them or getting groped by them."

My own humble opinion is that pheromones are as useful to humans as to any other species as a means of sensing danger, the electric air of excitement, anger, a presence, or of having the right or wrong chemistry with another person, whether sexually or simply as a matter of trust in a partnership.  Being that we are an intelligent species whose minds, after all, rule our actions and are fully capable of overriding instinct when social decorum requires it, the presence of pheromones do not in any way reduce us to animals and do not need to be subdued. In fact, they should NOT be subdued, IF that were even possible.  It wouldn't be natural.  

That was several years ago and I posted this response on my site at that time.  Another long-since corrupted link.  The response to that less politely worded response was a lot more Muslim men protests my dismissal of the value of hijab as well as outright scoldings that I took mine off with total disregard for male sanity and piety. That was When I decided to make a page on my site called About Women and Islam. 

What?  Did they think I'd say, "Oh you're right!  I'll just go and put my hijab back on?"  Silly men.  That is not what is EVER going to happen. 

Bite me.  I will blind you with the rays shooting off my lustrous hair like laser beams into your brain!  I'm going to be thinking of you whenever I need either a good laugh or a stiffer spine.  Either way, it works.

@distractedbyzombies coined an interesting phrase in his blog, Circles: "The biological is simply the manifestation of the spirit."  Good way of putting it.  Slightly different subject,  but that's the very verbiage I was looking for. 

Home again for day 5 of our local snowtastrophy (which I'm enjoying), I just finished watching a Discovery channel show about the possibilities  of time travel hosted by Morgan Friedman.  Actually, what they spoke most of was the physical limitations that would prevent it while somehow still managing to sound hopeful... like how our best "real" chance of experiencing the past was rebuilding it in holograms. 

Uh-huh.  I said aloud and shook my head in... what?  Disbelief? Negation? Doubt...?  Not sure.  Just, I don't know.  It veritably screamed "WRONG ANSWER!!!!!" to me.

I have no doubt that someday we'll be able to have hollo decks like in Star Trek the Next Generation, or something similar like in Matrix or The Thirteenth Floor.  But it will be just another form of movie or video game.  Our minds will play, but for sure they won't be fooled.

Our minds...  Our spirits....   Is the physical even the right place to look in time travel?  Of course not.  As Bear said, "the biological is simply the manifestation of the spirit."

Don't put the cart before the horse.  You want to manifest a reality or other time, look no further than the ocean of Consciousness we are all immersed in.  Even the Bible mentions it::

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day. - Genesis verses 1-5.

Think about this outside of its religious context.  Think symbol first, physical manifestation second.  All things are within us.  We have but to manifest them.  Time itself is an illusion we create for ourselves by which to organize our focus in a sequential way we can earn from.

I travel to other times and realities in my dreams all the time.  Some people do it by regressive or progressive hypnosis.  Some people do it by accident; lose their focus on this time for an instant, being at just the right mental frequency, and suddenly find themselves in another time.  There is no struggle coming back.  About the time they realize they've had a time slip, the startlement ( )at that is enough to bring them back to this one.  In the time travel experiments at Montauk, they used frequents to initiate a proper mind set to travel to another time and a powerful psychic to guide to guide the process. 

No, I'm not going into all that here.  The terms are easy enough for anyone interested to google themselves.

In short though, we've never lacked the ability to time travel.  What gets us nearly every time, though, is the handicap of getting stuck in the illusion to which we've expended so much focus.

In other times and realities, our other selves are similarly locked.  We have to let our minds drift from our own locks to get into those other viewpoints.  I don't worry about the grandfather paradox in doing this.  As far as I'm concerned, it doesn't exist.  All things possible are expressed somewhere in some reality.  Our decision points are every bit as infinite as the realities spawned therefrom. 

All that aside, I really like Morgan Friedman.  He looks so wise and huggable.  Everyone's perfect grandfather and sage... and with such a soothing voice... which is entirely beside the point.  @plantinthewindow also has a very nice voice and is huggable, albeit not grandfatherly, which is likewise entirely beside the point.

Sideways point: hypnosis is in the voice I suspect.  I also suspect that music can affect the mind and our focus quite similarly.

So  how is your day going?  What have you been up to or ruminating over? 

Has anyone here been able to change their theme within the last few days?  I can't, and it's driving me crazy.  I've designed a slew of good new background ideas and I can't enact ANY of them.  My muse is pounding herself against a brick wall trying to get her expressions through.  You know?  Help.  It's maddening!  

Yes, I'm having too much fun with the smiley today.  I think there should be more faces there.  So many more things to express!  So complicated to do it!  Erg.  Like trying to change my theme.

I've pretty much spent all day so far just working on my manuscript, Inside the Nexus and am already at 128 pages/28,527 words so I figure I can take a little blog break.  I'm doing good!

Also, while I was looking through photos for this project, I found a number of orb shots I want to share.  This first one was taken at Fort Casey by a friend of mine, Carol Telus while she and her family were exploring one of the tunnels there.  She felt someone lift and play with hair and then poke and icy cold finger INto her back when none of the others were behind her.  It freaked her out so badly she screamed and ran out of there with the others coming after, also having felt something odd in there.  But Carol turned and looked back again a second before exiting.  Despite not seeing anything there, she still wanted a picture of the tunnel and took this one, which she gave me permission to post:

She didn't see the orb there until after the picture was downloaded.  Up close, it's a complex structure, typical of orbs I'm told, but I'm also wondering if the flash she had to have used could have done this?  Those tunnels are pitch black... which kinda makes them all the more scary when an unseen something starts playing with your hair.  I'm not mentioning this because I doubt her.  She's had other such experiences there and so have I and others as well.  They happen.  What I don't understand is why the orb manefestations?  What do they mean?  Anyone know the going theory on these?

I've gotten plenty of orb shots myself.  I got an interesting orb shot while visiting the Rothchilds house with my husband during the Victorian Festival in Port Townsend in 2006 but it wasn’t in the house.  I’d paused in the front yard to take a picture of another house across the street and got this.

It seems almost to have a face.  I didn’t see it at the time I took the picture; only afterward when back home I downloaded the photos I’d taken.  It was clear and dry that day so I doubt that its moisture.  Also, I didn’t realize the camera had taken this photo.  I didn’t hear the sound it usually makes when a photo is completed so I tried again a few seconds later and got this:

That orb shot is not the only one I got at Port Townsend by the way.  I got almost as many orb shots as clear ones at the Victorian Grand Ball every single time we attended.  It was held in a building on the local fairgrounds with no reputation for being haunted.  Nor did the place seem dusty.  I have pretty bad sinuses and usually notice immediately when there’s too much dust or pollen in the air.   It’s miserable for me.  But that didn’t happen at the ball, not once, yet this is what showed up in at least every other picture I took:

Some people say that orbs are ghosts or spirit energy or vehicles called merkaba that souls travel around in.  I’m not sure what to think about that.  I just think it’s fascinating how often they show up in my pictures in certain places. 

Here's another one I got, this one in a private club/recording studio in Everett when I attended my dance instructor's birthday party there.  That's Jeb there sitting at the table.  Neither of us saw that orb or any while we were there.  Possily it's a lighting affect on particulate matter in the air?  Just guessin here.  But again, I didn't have the sinus reaction I would have had if there'd been a lot of dust or pollen in the air and the other shots I took were clear for the most part.

Any thoughts on these?  Tell me your ghost stories?  Also, just for fun, tell me where you think you go when you die and why you think so.  Is there a religious reason for your thoughts on this, or is it just a personal opinion?  Based on what?

I did not go straight to writing this morning by the by.  The first thing I did was choose my first Kindle books now that I've figured out how to use it.  Yay!  My new best toy!

I got:

The Nine Lives of Choloe King by Liz Braswell, which is so far following the televisionshow very accurately.  Or rather the other way around?  Anyway, it's good!  I want to be a cat girl when I grow up.

Pale Boundaries by Scott Cleveland.  I just chanced on this one.

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransome Riggs that was recommended to me by someone here but I can't recall who.  Anyway, it looked tantalizingly good!

The Innocence Machine by Keiko Alvarez whose spicy blogs I used to read back on MySpace up until a few years ago.  The Innocence Machine was a dream of the distant future she had that she'd blogged about just before I left MySpace a few years ago.  I told her, "You should write a novel based on that!" and she told me, "You'd better believe I will!"  And she did!  I couldn't her blog anymore.  It had been completely deleted.  Dismayed because I wanted to read that dream of hers again, I googled the title and there it came up on Xanga with her name.  She was good as her word and it is SOOOOOO encouraging to me that she was able to do it like she said.  And she didn't stop there.  She'd written plenty of other books since.  But I'm going to read this one first.

Another book I know of that was inspired by a dream is Twilight by Stephanie Meyer.  I know that from the blog she keeps on her website.  Already read it though.

A Modern Witch by Debora Geary.  Thought it sounded rather... charmed.  Right up my alley, you know?

Last but not least is Locked On by Tom Clancy and Mark Greaney.  This one's for Jeb.  He likes this sort of bang bang shoot 'em up kind of spy adventure.  I'm neutral on the subject, but I plan to share.  He'll probably pick out more of these later on.

Any suggestions for us?

How is your day going?  Xanga giving anyone half the lip it's been giving me?

So now the lasagne is baking in the oven and I have almost an hour to kill, murder, pulverate, whatever until it's done while Jeb is doing the same to something or other on his video game in the living room, I can do some serious blogging to make up for being less than serious lately.

Okay, not really.  I'm really no good at serious.  It sounds boring.  But I have some new pictures to post from Christmas Eve to now.  Don't worry.  Just my favorites.  Don't run away.

Here's where I was watching y'all from on Christmas Eve before company arrived:

These are my grandkiddies Levi and Vanessa wearing the animal hats I got them for Christmas:

...and my sister Gail wearing the one I got for her. 

Aren't they all cute? But my nephews, Gail's pup dogs little Tigger and big Jett are awfully cute too playing with the toys I got them.  LOL!  It was hilarious watching them tear open the wrapping paper like a pair of excited little kids. 

As soon as he got his, little Tigger then went over and tried to steal Jett's toy, repeatedly.  Everytime he got it, he'd run with it until Jett grabbed the end and it would turn into a tug of war.  Funny.

First thing I did when the new year began was, of course, redecorate my terrariums and aquarium again.  What can I say?  It's an obsession.

That's the salamander climbing the glass there.  I don't know where he thought he was going.  LOL.  A sampling of each of my cute little critters took a turn at showing off:

Look!  Pikachu came out of hiding, pouches full, to see what was up.

Well after Christmas was over sans snow and the new year begun, NOW we get snow; LOTS of it! This was our front yard yesterday afternoon.  It's thicker now, but too dark for a good picture.  It keeps snowing.

...And this is a picture Jeb took at work this morning.  This is the view we have from the floor to ceiling window in the lab.  Isn't it beautiful?  I thought it looked rather like a Thomas Kindcaid painting:

Anyway, I stayed in writing all weekend.  I got a serious inspiration in the middle of the night after I posted Dreams to Stories.  Guess I was runinating over what to do with all that potential story fodder and it kept me awake.  But I thought of something!  Yeah, I know you've all heard it from me before but this time I'm serious!  Well, as serious as I can be without being too boring or getting bored that is.  I even designed a cover,

(Jeb photographed the rose in our garden a few years ago and I collaged it onto a nebula)

wrote the blurb (which admittedly sounds gradious and needs some serious work),

"It is my conviction that reality is not a solid state, not a single state of being, but rather a matrix of infinite realities, dreams the nexus which binds them.  I believe we are all connected, that god is the overall scope of what we are: expressions of creation in which all things are possible.  What follows is my view of this incredible nexus we are all immersed in merely in the act of existing."

(Seriously... I use that word so often.  I wonder if I really know what it means?)

...and I've got about 48 pages/9,236 words into it so far.  But it's only been two days solid work on it.  Most of the time I'm too busy earning a living to do that.  Writing doesn't pay the bills alas.

On the other hand, I've gotten some great encouragement lately. THREE of my blogger friends have been published lately: @plantinthewindow, @vanedave, and Keiko Alvarez who I knew from MySpace and lost touch with after I left MySpace a few years ago.  But when I stopped by there to get the links for some old dream blogs this weekend, I couldn't get to her MySpace page.  It had been deleted.  But her last message to me had been that she'd had a mind blowing dream about the future and fully intended to write it into a science fiction novel.  She'd blogged the bare bones of that dream.  It was called The Innocence Machine.  I'd wanted to read it again.  But no good.  All her blogs were gone.  But then I googled that title and it came up at Amazon with her name as the author and it turned out she not only wrote that one but a lot more.  She, like me, gets most of her stories from dreams and most of them are erotic... but that's good stuff too.  She's a wonderful writer.  I'm glad she could turn her dreams into books.  It's so encouraging!

I've mentioned before that I don't like to buy things online for fear of identity theft and all that, but now I have to.  I got a Kindle for Christmas and that's the only way I'll be able to fill it up.  Keiko's books are in print as well as on Kindle, so I can get a lot of those.  I'm hoping John's and Dave's books will be too? 

Oh dear.  LThe lasagne is smelling very done.  Gotto go!

Tonight I'm making minestroni to use up the last of some leftover prime rib before it spoils:

Chopped up 2 cups worth of the leftover cooked beef and put in a pot on medium heat.  I'm out of olive oil and refuse to use wesson or margarine, so relied on the beef fat as it heats up instead.

Chopped up one onion and dumped that on top of the beef.

Chopped up 2 cups each worth of baby carrots, celery stalks, and green bell pepper, dumped that on top of the onions and gave the conglomeration a good stir.  The beef fat is worked splendidly.

Added 1 TBSP of Tumeric, 2 TBSP Italian seasoning, a good sprinkle of Johnny Season Salt, and stirred.

The onions are golden by the time I add one 14.5 oz can of Del Monte dice tomatoes with zesty green chilies and 3 or 4 cans of water (Okay, I forget how much) and a cup of dry green split pea.  (Any legume would have served my purpose.  That's the only one I had hand short of canned green beans and I didn't want to use that.  You can if you want to.)  Then I turn the heat on high and put on the lid.  Keep adding water as needed.

When it boils, I'd check the condition of the peas.  If they're still hard, I'll let them cook until they've begun to soften.  Then I'll add a half cup of Sangria, stir it in, followed by 2 cups of pasta shells stirred in, and cover the pot, lifting it now and then for a quick stir until done.

This will be good with some nice hot French bread I think.  It's a comfort thing.  Smells good right now.