No Fuss Meals
Today we begin our Entrepreneur of the Month series. These two-part tales of inspired visionaries typically feature an individual. My initial intent was to profile a woman, Caryl Ginsburg Fantel, who has her finger on the pulse and solution for every mom and dad, woman-on-the-go or scattered bachelor seeking an easy, quick way to prepare fresh, hot home-cooked meals.
Perfect, I thought. I’ll air it during the insanity-filled holiday season when everyone is too busy to chop and shop and no one is eating right. Well, long story short, I found not just the woman but an extended family of entrepreneurs. Three generations to be exact all led by patriarch Art Ginsburg – better known as Mr. Food – the jolly kitchen sweetheart and nationally syndicated television host, popular food personality and cook book author. For decades now he has dispensed lessons on how to whip up New York pushcart onion sauce and perfect puff-topped fish fillets.
Ginsburg agreed to meet me the day after Thanksgiving at one of his stores here in Davie, Florida. What I found spectacular about him was his authenticity. Sure he hams it up a bit … continually sneaking into the conversation his signature phrase …
“OOOOOHHHH IT’S SO GOOD!” But I believe the reason his business model works so well is that it is a reflection on who HE really is and in what he truly believes. It’s the simple concept of teaching people to prepare convenient meals that anybody can do.
And that ethos he describes so well about life translates into Ginsburg’s business model – it has worked every time. Over the past two-decades, Ginsburg Enterprises annual revenues which initially were derived from 90-second television cooking spots and cook book royalties has grown from about $830,000 to more than $15 million in 2006. His latest endeavor that began three years ago is a franchise concept called Mr. Food, No-Fuss Meals.
No-Fuss Meals is simply an extension of Ginsburg’s on air trademark: convenient meals that anyone can prepare. Customers assemble their own no-fuss meals at stores using pre-prepared ingredients guided by easy to follow printed directions. Intrigued?
Well, tune in on Tuesday for the second installment of our two-part Entrepreneur of the Month Series and join me for a little Reality KBTV, I'll be on location at the Mr. Food No Fuss Meals Franchise in Davie as I prepare 5 days of dinners.
See
pictures!
“Tow-To-Go”
This holiday season tow trucks throughout the southeast will be transporting a different type of cargo…merry-making revelers who think they are too drunk to drive. It’s all part of a program co-sponsored by AAA Auto Club South and beer maker Anheuser-Busch. One that’s kept thousand of drunk drivers off the roads during days like Cinco de Mayo and Halloween.
“Tow-To-Go” is a program run through AAA. Trucks contracted by the company respond to callers who have had too much to drink and take them and their cars home – free of charge. This service, which operates on holidays with high rates of drunken-driving accidents such as Super Bowl weekend and St. Patrick’s Day and from Thanksgiving through New Year’s Eve, is open to anyone. You don’t have to be a member. All you do is dial 1-800-AAA-HELP and the tow truck with pick you up. The whole thing is completely confidential.
The program will be celebrating its tenth anniversary next year. Since its inception in 1998, the program has helped keep nearly 7,000 potential drunken drivers off the roads, which the folks at AAA say is saving lives. Alcohol is a factor in almost half of all traffic fatalities, and each year about 16,000 people are killed in alcohol related crashes.
Joanna Newton, who heads up Public and Government Affairs at AAA, says the “Tow-to-go” program continues to grow. It now encompasses all of Florida as well as Atlanta and Savannah, Georgia; Nashville, Tennessee; and during the holiday season, Knoxville, Tennessee. Despite the success, she wants to remind drivers that this service is meant as a last resort. Before you start drinking come up with a plan to get home.
A final piece of interesting information I came across while doing this piece: People think that New Years Eve is the WORST day for drunk driving accidents, but I came to learn that it’s actually a distant second to Thanksgiving. AAA’s hypothesis is that since Thanksgiving is a family holiday people feel they need to drink more to have fun with their family!
Happy Thanksgiving!
Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
I decided to stay local and help out my friends Steve and Laura Kennedy with a buffet-style all-afternoon event at the Lion’s Club in Boca Raton, FL. I have enclosed some
pictures for your perusal!
I hope it was a great day for everyone. I certainly have a lot to be thankful for!
Reading Minds
Whether we know it or not … we all think we can read our boyfriend’s … girlfriend’s, our partner’s, spouses’ … minds. We’re all a bunch of street corner psychics – in our own minds. Maybe it’s just a moment … when we’re peering into our boss’ eyes … looking for a sign … hmm … am I really getting that raise? Or perhaps it’s a snap judgment … we watch our best girlfriend as she focuses in on the purple alligator handbag we just bought, does she like it…or is she just jealous?
The point is: we’re constantly drawing on our powers of observation, our database of experience, and the morass of scar tissue and hope we call emotion to help us decipher what the people around us are thinking and feeling. Dr. Daniel Siegel, a psychiatrist from UCLA and the author of The Mindful Brain puts it quite simply: “we’re creating a map of another person’s internal state.” The good news it’s healthy to not be so self-centered. The bad news is we’re not half as good at what is now popularly being termed as “Mindsight” … as we think we are!
In the most recent issue of Psychology Today, the cover story, brilliantly written by Annie Murphy Hall, explores this issue in great detail. Murphy Hall concludes that mind reading of this sort is a critical human skill … it’s the way we make sense of other people’s behavior and decide our next moves. Mindsight, also known as empathetic accuracy, allows us to cooperate and compete … to differentiate between manipulation or seduction. For instance, if someone finds our jokes hysterical or if he or she is humoring us and secretly wants us to shut up and go away. Apparently mind reading is the most important element of what sociologists and call social intelligence.
OK. Pause. This piece comes with a warning label, as I alluded to before, if we do this “mind reading” thing poorly … it can lead to disastrous consequences. Think about the patterns of behavior that characterize abusive husbands – these violent men attribute negative thoughts to their wives – and then lash out. Poor mind reading can lead to feeling lonely in a relationship – perhaps unnecessarily.
Mixing up the message happens a lot more than we think. According to William Ickes, a psychologist at the University of Texas at Arlington and the father of empathetic accuracy, we’re not very good at reading each other’s minds at all. Strangers (who are videotaped and later report their second-by-second thoughts and feelings as well as their assessments of their counterpart’s thoughts and feelings) read each other with an average accuracy rate of 20%. Close couples nudge up to 35%. And almost no one scores over 60%.
So what does it take to actually assess another person’s thoughts and feelings? Reading body language can reveal a person’s basic emotion. Facial expressions are also cues we use to know what others are thinking – despite the 3,000 different expressions we may deploy each day – it’s the fleeting micro expressions that betray most of our feelings. But surprisingly, at least to me anyway, it is the content of speech … yes the actual words that contribute most to our success at mind reading. Yep...it’s not all touchy feely stuff! Words matter!
Finally to dispel one of the oldest wives’ tales of mind reading … no pun intended … women are not better at it than men. In Dr. Ickes’ work, he emphasizes the difference in mind reading aptitude between men and women. And I quote “It’s not an ability thing … It’s a motivational thing.” Translation: We try. Men don’t.
See
pictures from the interviews!
A Post from Joan of Arc
Another Friday night in Boca Raton and I’m fried. What a week – we ran the skydiving series “13,500 Reasons to Scream” after which I fielded what felt like hundreds of calls from friends and family intermittently questioning and downright accusing me about whether or not I’d lost my mind.
“Katie, I don’t have 13,500 reasons to scream but I certainly have one … watching a video of my daughter jump out of an airplane on Youtube. Call me!” My mother sounded a little hysterical on my voice mail. I promised myself I’d try to call her back from the car.
There’s a magnificent sunset – the kind printed on old postcards from the ‘80s stacked at the front desk of bad motels in Tampa. Cars are darting in and out without the luxury of blinkers and the realization that the Snow Birds are here for “The Season” begins to sink in. Ok. Now I get it. I turn down Camino Real to swing left on 4th Street to hang another left into the parking lot of Joan of Arc, a giant church with a tall steeple on the right.
I walk upstairs to the second floor to see my sometimes co-conspirator, oft confidante, and forever most-cherished friend, Laura Kennedy; she’s shouting orders like a lieutenant in the Special Forces. Young men of all shapes and sizes are organizing chairs and tables into perfect rows.
What’s amazing is not that this pretty, petite, professional beauty of part-Cuban descent is barking orders in the middle of a church at 7 o’clock on a Friday night; what’s amazing is a bunch of guys who look like they stepped out of the “extras” line for Goodfellas or who are now regulars on “Miami Ink” were following her instructions unquestioningly. She’s amazing. She sees me and flashes me a big smile, her eyes dancing with laughter. I’ve always thought Laura looks a little like Liza Minnelli in her ‘70s idol-Studio 54 heyday combined with one of the icons worshipped by every little girl who grew up figure skating in my era … Dorothy Hamill.
I loop back into the Ladies Room. As I wash my hands, the woman in the mirror – a fraught and frail version of me – stares back…looking exhausted, angry and a little confused. I take a deep breath and walk in and grab a seat next to Laura. We kiss cheek to cheek.
Everyone in the room settles down and it gets very, very quiet. Then he begins to speak. Jake. He’s a light-haired, blue-eyed skinny kid from Baltimore...mid twenties … his diction is Gansta … his exterior screams White Suburbia. He’s deep – in a kind of Eminem type way. I love Eminem, by the way. Exteriors can be deceiving – I soon learn.
But tonight he wasn’t talking about exteriors. Actually, he was. He was talking about how his obsession with the outside – his outsides, your outsides, my outsides almost killed him. I’m sitting there at 7 p.m. on a Friday night because the same game almost killed me too.
Suddenly he begins to talk about his “Ex.” He had recently seen her downtown and he spent a minute or two recalling their painful breakup which ended with her shouting at him … in the middle of the road … at dawn … “Jake, why won’t you let me love you.”
That got my attention. He carried on for a moment and just as he began to lose me in a morass of anecdotes he suddenly stopped. Then he looked up and – almost poetically – blurted out: “Why would I continue to make someone a priority who considers me an option?”
Suddenly everyone else in the room just faded away and it was just me and him. Jake at the podium, and me, quietly sitting in one of the millions of chairs that litter Florida’s public schools. I was transfixed. Then it was over and everyone was hugging and back slapping and kissing and smiling.
I hopped up on one of the tables against the wall in the back of the room to take in the scene and catch my breath.
Why possibly make someone a priority who considers you an option? I had never asked myself that before.
Jazz, Jasmine & Joyous
(…continued from November 13th)
I arrived in Anguilla with the usual clichés mired in my brain of how vacations should look and feel in the Caribbean. Beautiful sunsets like rainbow sorbet, bright-white toothy smiles from men in white dressed in white linen with even whiter fluffy towels, steel calypso bands humming in the moonlight, and lazy naps nestled in hammocks with a dog-eared yellowing Michael Crichton thriller.
This, however, was not my experience on this particular visit to the Caribbean. No fault of Anguilla, mind you, nor the Anguillans. This beautiful 35 square-mile island (16 miles long by three miles wide) is the most northerly of the Leeward Islands. It’s a short 25-minute ferry ride from St. Marten and just to give you a rough idea of its size … the population totals just 12,300 residents.
As I mentioned on Tuesday, I traveled there to meet my Managing Editor, Rachael Joyner, who was covering the Tranquility Jazz Festival for Jazziz Magazine. I arrived a day late to find Rachael just coming back from a day on a boat tour with a bunch of other journalists. She looked perfectly rosy (sun kissed,) refreshed and enthusiastic about our adventure. So was I.
I think we were both relieved to quickly discover that this Eastern Caribbean island has been somewhat overlooked as a “hot” destination spot, historically anyway. One theory floated by the local cab driver who ferried me in from the airport was that it’s flat and tourists prefer the mountains of St. Marten – just nine short miles away. (I later learned that the sparse rainfall contributes to the “crêpe look” – as he described it – because all that grows are small trees and shrubs.)
Rachael has a knack for choosing shot locations for the KBTVonline “standups.” She chose our backyard – one of the most desirable beaches I’d ever seen … think untarnished and
tranquil. Also, I thought it was interesting that Anguilla is known as the wreck diving capital of the Caribbean. It advertises wrecks that were sunk intentionally to satisfy the curiosity of divers.
But what emerged for Rachael and me – first and foremost – were the people of Anguilla - the locals. They all seemed to possess an ethos of quiet confidence, a mixture of wisdom and humility, which permeates every encounter. From our chat, with a classically French trained chef,
an Anguillan native, to Auntie Bee,
the weathered woman who sells handmaid jewelry on Shoal Beach, to our taxi driver/tour guide, who turned out to be a local politician. I felt blessed and relieved to not be so deeply steeped in the underlying resentment that I often feel when I travel in the Caribbean. The tension between the haves and the have-nots, those who serve and we who are served. Instead the experience felt collaborative – dignities in tact.
Jazz in Anguilla
While road tripping up to Orlando for the “Halloween Horror Nights” piece, Rachael slipped that she had been asked to go to Anguilla to cover the Tranquility Jazz Festival for a magazine called Jazziz.
I looked left. She looked right. Screeeeeeech. We nearly rear ended a FedEx truck.
“Do you want to come?” She asked.
“I think so.” Hmmm. I began to ponder the mixture of Anguilla, Jazz, sun, sea, fun, and a factor that I’m sure most of us can understand … “Awayness.” Away from my life, away from my home office, away from my relationship, away from drama, just away. Away from it all.
Two weeks later I was on a flight to Anguilla and what ensued was … well … you’ll have to tune in to the KBTVonline blog in two days, November 15, for the whole story. But in the meantime these
photos should suffice as a proper – in TV-speak – “tease."
… to be continued …
The Skydiving Dare!
I’ve wracked my brain, but I simply cannot remember how it all started. There are, however, a few things I know unequivocally:
• Mondays for my staff and myself are … put quite simply … “screamers." By 8 o’clock Monday night, when we all convene at KBTV HQ (my townhouse on the beach) to nibble on pizza and plot to take over the content world on the Internet – we’re punchy. To say the least.
So, I don’t really remember but thinking back – I’m sure it was Jason – our illustrious Webmaster and Deputy Editor. He’s got a little bit of the devil in him, as you can
see .
It went something like this. Suddenly Jason slapped a piece of pepperoni pizza (his favorite) onto a Chinette “paper” plate. “Kate,” he says demurely. “How about skydiving?”
“Fab!” I heard myself shriek.
Then this whole idea took on a life of its own. Apparently Jason had a friend at Sebastian Sky Dive named Amanda (I never met Amanda so I think Jason might have invented her … lending more credence to my theory that he was behind all of this :-D). My normal producer Barry was out for a week with a pulled lower back so we sent in the Polish Special Forces in the form of “Krzysztof”
to shoot the event. There was no way in hell I was going to jump out of an airplane that WASN’T on fire unless it was to be recorded in perpetuity.
Camera pans forward 13 days and Krzysztof and I are tearing North on I-95 to a world with fewer and fewer signs of civilization, Sebastian, FL. We ended up on a road called Airport West Drive (which looked like it was out of Clint Eastwood’s classic “Deliverance”) and pulled into a field with two planes and a barn serving as a hangar. After I signed and initialed no fewer than four pages of waivers, a spunky fellow with a crew cut was plastering goggles over my eyes.
“Don’t worry,” he murmured. “It won’t hurt.”What won’t hurt? The goggles? Hello! I wasn’t worried about the goggles. Try the LANDING. Next thing I know I’m sitting on the lap of a South African blond Adonis named Warren …
Well, the
pictures tell the rest! ... Be sure to tune in on Thursday November 15th for Part 1 of our two-part series and OF COURSE tune in to Part 2 for the actual jump that weekend (November 17t.h)
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial::A Photo Tour
Last weekend I traveled up to Washington, D.C. to meet up with a friend for an 18-hour vacation from my technology-snafu-driven life. We woke up on Sunday to a crisp, clear, chilly, sunny – in all respects – a perfect fall day. Autumn is my favorite season – something about that “back to school” mentality – it’s always given me a feeling of unlimited potential and hope. My friend and I are avid, amateur photographers, so we decided to go on an impromptu walking tour of the mall.
Sometime just before noon, I found myself staring at three men in navy-blue uniforms standing in a tight-knit huddle in front of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, facing the 58,256 engraved names. The bright sun cast a glow above the National Mall and down onto the reflecting pool to the east. The polished black granite wall served as a reflector pool of its own – alternating shadow and illumination. Visitors wandered about with disposable cameras, bulky professional Nikons with zoom lenses and everything in between … evoking the sense of the transience and reflection that the memorial, since its 1982 groundbreaking, has sought to convey.
On November 13, the memorial turns 25. The criticism that dogged the project in its early days—its unconventional design, its black color, its lack of ornamentation—has given way to appreciation of its simple, emotional power. The twenty-fifth anniversary will be observed starting on November 6 with music and poetry. Over the next four days, the names of American soldiers who died in Vietnam will be read aloud. The first such reading took place in November 1982, a time when soldiers who had returned from the war were barely in their 30s. Veterans have embraced the wall in unexpected numbers, as has the general public. More than 3.6 million people visited last year, nearly triple the number of visitors to the White House and the Washington Monument combined.
I dug deep into the lobe in my brain that hopefully remembers a fraction of the American History I supposedly learned my junior year in high school. I somehow recalled that one of the stated goals of the Wall was to avoid commentary on the war itself, serving solely as a memorial to those who served.
In that spirit … I’ll simply leave you this morning with some photos I snapped as I wandered about with those who served, the Americans kneeling to honor the dead and patriots like me – folks hoping to learn a little bit more about gratitude and yearn a lot more for peace in Iraq.
Click here to see the pictures
The Best Way To Die
For centuries people have tried to solve the mystery surrounding death. What’s it like? Where do you go? Do you really see a light at the end of the tunnel? There have been books, movies and plays on death, but the true mystery of passing from this life to the next can only be unraveled in the final seconds before the end. \
Well, thanks to some keen scientific advances and recounts of final moments from those who have lived through near-death experiences, scientists have been able to describe what it feels like to die.
Death comes in many forms, but it’s usually a lack of oxygen to the brain that delivers the coup de grace. When a person’s head is deprived of oxygen there’s a cessation of electrical activity in the brain — the modern definition of death. Science says you have about 10 seconds after oxygen stops coming to your brain before you pass out.
In reporting my latest piece for the “Watercooler Diaries,” I uncovered some of the grisly details surrounding five high-profile ways to die. As it turns out, losing your head may not be as painful as it sounds. Read on to see what I mean, but beware this stuff gets kind of creepy.
Drowning. There’s a certain dark romance to it. Many literary heroines — think Ophelia — have met their end slipping beneath the dark waves with layers of petticoats floating around their heads. But this demise is neither pretty nor painless, although it can be quick.
Just how fast depends on swimming ability and water temperature. However, two-thirds of drowning victims are good swimmers, which suggests that people can get into trouble quickly. First comes the “surface struggle.” The victims gasp for air then hold their breath as they bob beneath. Studies with New York lifeguards have found that this stage lasts just 20 to 60 seconds. Once they submerge, they hold their breath for as long as possible — about 30 to 90 seconds. After that, they inhale some water, splutter, cough and inhale more water. The water blocks the delicate gas exchange that goes on the lungs and also triggers the airway to seal shut. Then comes a tearing and burning sensation in the chest as water travels into the airway and finally the victim slips into a feeling of calmness and tranquility, basically the beginnings of loss of consciousness from oxygen deprivation. This eventually causes the heart to stop and brain death.
Bleeding to death. We’ve all seen it in the movies: soldiers gushing from a gunshot wound, a blood-drenched woman slipping away after a car crash. This kind of death can take minutes or hours depending on how bad the wound is. Called exsanguinations, bleeding to death has a range of feelings, according to survivor reports, which range from fear to relative calm. The average adult has 5 liters of blood. Anyone losing 1.5 liters feels weak, thirsty, anxious and breaths really fast. By 2 liters, they get dizzy, confused and eventually go unconscious.
Decapitation. It seems a bit gruesome, but it can actually be one of the quickest and least painful ways to die — as long as the executioner is skilled, the blade is sharp and the condemned sits still. The guillotine, adopted by the French government in 1792, was seen as a more humane way to die. But get this, scientists think that consciousness continues after the spinal chord is severed. One study on rats found that it takes about 7 seconds for the brain to consume the oxygen from the blood left in the head. Some macabre reports from post-revolutionary France cite movements of the eyes and mouth 15 to 30 seconds after the blade came down.
Death by fire. Long the fate of witches and heretics, this demise is truly torture. Hot smoke and flames singe eyebrows and hair and burn the throat and airways, leaving you gasping for breath. Meanwhile, the burns inflict immediate and intense pain by stimulating pain nerves in the skin. As the intensity increases some feeling is lost but not much. Most people in fires don’t actually die from burns. They die from inhaling toxic gases and a suffocating lack of oxygen.
Lethal injection. This end was designed in Oklahoma in 1977 as a humane alternative to the electric chair, but is it really painless? It’s a series of three drug injections. First comes the anaesthetic thiopental to speed away any feelings of pain, followed by a paralytic agent called pancuronium to stop breathing. And finally, potassium chloride in injected. This stops the heart almost instantly. Each drug is given in a lethal dose to ensure a speedy death. However, eyewitnesses have reported inmates convulsing, heaving and attempting to sit up during the procedure suggesting this drug cocktail is not always completely effective. Dr. Leonidas Koniaris at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine suggests that awareness is a real possibility in a large number of executions. He says inmates could feel suffocation from paralyzed lungs and the searing, burning pain of a potassium chloride injection, but because of the paralytic a witness may never see the outward signs of pain.
Tune into the “Watercooler Diaries” on KBTVonline Tuesday for our piece, “How it Feels to Die.”
