Psst! WANT TO BECOME FAMOUS?

What regular daily activity did Ronald Reagan, Winston Churchill, Harry Truman, and General George Patton all share?  The answer is that along with many other distinguished men and women, these leaders all kept diaries.

If you consider it a coincidence that many famous people happen to have kept diaries, you’d be wrong.  It is not that eminent personalities keep diaries.  It is that ordinary people who keep diaries often become notable.  All the diarists listed above started keeping diaries long before they became famous.

Let me explain with a nugget of ancient Jewish wisdom. 

Upon leaving Egypt, the Israelites were directed to count formally each passing day for seven entire weeks until the fiftieth day which would be the holyday of Shavuot or Pentecost.  This is the day on which God gave Moses the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai.  (Leviticus 23:15-16)  Thus, fifty days after acquiring physical freedom, they would acquire spiritual freedom by accepting God’s message to mankind, the Torah.

People often mistakenly assume that their counting reflected their eagerness to reach Mount Sinai and receive the Torah.  However, had this been so, the counting would be in descending order, just the way school children count down to summer vacation.  On the day after the Exodus, they would have said “Today there are 49 days left,” and thus day by day they would have counted down to zero.  In reality, the Israelites counted in ascending order, starting with one and ending with forty-nine on the eve of Shavuot, just as we do today.

There can be only one explanation and ancient Jewish wisdom confirms it.  We are not counting how many days remain; we are counting how many have passed.  The seven weeks separating Passover and Shavuot are meant to be 49 days of spiritual growth and the first step in authentic self-development is to recognize the passage of time and the value of each and every day.  There is no better way to do this than engage in a formalized daily ritual that marks each passing day.

In Judaism, the days of the week are numbered not named. Sunday is day one, Monday is day two, and so on.  In the Torah, the months are also numbered rather than named.  These are further examples of the stress placed on keeping ourselves aware of time’s passage.

Through old French and Latin, both the words “journal” and “diary” are derived from the word day.  Even the word “journalist” used to apply to someone who wrote for a daily newspaper.  It follows that the entire purpose of a diary or a personal journal is to record things on a daily basis.  

Most of us would take no more than ten seconds to think of three actions we could take that would utterly ruin our lives.  What is more, each of those three ways to destruction could be accomplished in just a few hours, at most.  However, if I asked you to think of three things you could undertake that would significantly improve your life, it would be much harder, wouldn’t it?  What is more, once you did think of three life-enhancing actions, you’d notice that all of them would take considerable time and require long term commitment. Continue reading THOUGHT TOOLS →

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Foreword by Stan Lerner: written as only the great Alec Silverman can the story of Mad Vanilla to follow is a sweet treat to end the day. I am also familiar with this precious substance and find it a great source of pride that it can only be found here in downtown Los Angeles. 

Great chefs are always seeking the finest ingredients, winemakers the best fruit and perfumers the purest expression of each aroma in fragrances.  What they have in common is reliance on highly developed olfactory sense.  Practitioners of the three above named professions would be thrilled to discover what Dan Norton shared with me last Monday; but it is pastry chefs – also called pâtissiers – who might have to change their underwear after tasting this product.   He has created what may be the greatest vanilla extract ever produced in the U.S.

This unsweetened precious flavoring agent has the most sublime and potent vanilla flavor and aroma imaginable.  It was made with one of the world’s most sought after vanilla beans, the Madagascar Black Bourbon species.  Because it has been aged for six years, (compared to the twenty-day average of commercially available vanilla extracts), it has developed what wine experts refer to as bouquet: a complex combination of fragrances.  Although it has never touched wood, it has notes of cedar as well as plum, dried fig, white pepper and woodsmoke.  Just like wine grapes, vanilla beans develop character specific to their variety and the place they are cultivated.  These elongated seed pods are the fruit of the vanilla orchid.  They require three years to develop into fruit bearers.  After harvest they must be sun-dried for up to six months during which time they also ferment and develop their distinctive flavor and aroma.  There are about 110 different species and they have global proliferation in the tropical and subtropical regions of four continents and many islands.  

Using a 35% higher than normal concentration of vanilla beans he infused super-premium vodka , steeping this brew for six years.  In the early 2000’s the entire crop of this prized orchid was destroyed by cyclones, the most devastating of which was named Huddah.  These catastrophic storms plunged the island-nation’s economy into desperation as their two most important export crops, vanilla and coffee, were lost.  This drove the price of Mr. Norton’s beans to over $240 a pound when they were last seen on the market, five years ago.  Although he would like to make more extract he can’t get these vanilla beans anymore.  The nurseries have rebounded but seed pods of the size and quality of the 2003 crop have not yet been produced.  Thankfully, unlike many other flora and fauna of Madagascar, they haven’t become recently extinct. (Over twenty percent of the world’s plant and animal species are exclusive to the African island, which is slightly larger than the country of France, from which it became independent in 1960.  Indeed, for this biodiversity some scientists refer to it as the “eighth continent”.)  
  
Necessity being the mother of invention, and Mr. Norton being the type of man who is driven to pursue the highest degree of excellence, there simply wasn’t a good enough vanilla extract to put into his family’s secret recipe Irish Pound Cake.  This clandestine information is no joke; it’s been in the family for over 250 years.  It’s not for sale and it would require torture to get it out of him.  If the expense he has gone to seems extravagant bear in mind that pound cake was named after the British Pound and one pound 250 years ago is the equivalent of hundreds of dollars today. Continue reading The Perfection of an Essence →

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Hello wine lovers, today is Monday the 11^th of May and its Monday Merlot Madness! . Tonight from 5pm until 8pm at the wine café at Ralphs we will be hosting Kendall Jackson Winery and the Merlot wines they feature.  Kendall Jackson wine is a household name in the wine industry.  What most people do not know is that Kendall Jackson (KJ) is a major owner of many high end brands that are frequently found on fine dining establishment wine lists.  Legacy, Atalon, Robert Young, and Cardinale are a few wines in the list.  KJ went through a major expansion acquiring high-end wineries that needed a better marketing team to represent the wine they produced.  KJ’s marketing team was the right fit for the task at hand.  KJ owns many more brands much too long to list here, be assured that they are quality wines in the portfolio.  Despite what Miles from “Sideways” might think, Merlot has rebounded as a varietals of choice since the kitschy movie the late 90’s.

Merlot found its roots in the village of Bordeaux being the most planted grape in that region. Continue reading Hello Wine Lovers! →

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