Brooklyn Boys NY Style Deli (Friday night), & our Second Annual St. Veronus Celebration!

This Saturday is the return of our second annual St. Veronus Day celebration!

As you know, we're a Belgian style brewery, so instead of throwing a St. Patty's Day party we figured we'd celebrate the patron saint of Belgian brewers – St. Veronus. Last year we had a great time releasing special beers, listening to some Belgian music (very festive!), and tasting some Belgian snacks. This year will be no different. Here's what you can expect:

Melange #3: We released this beer for the very first time at last year's St. Veronus celebration. It's a fabulous blend of Black Tuesday, White Oak Sap and our anniversary ale – all bourbon barrel aged. It's a complex and delicious mix that will keep you naming flavors. This will also be our next Reserve Society release, so if you haven't had it before, now's your chance!

Holiday Wine Cellar 45th Anniversary Beer: This recipe was the winner of a home brew competition held by Holiday Wine Cellar in Escondido. I'm thrilled that this was chosen as the winner – it's an Imperial Porter with vanilla bean and bourbon soaked oak cubes – and it's tasting great! This is one of my favorite styles and it wears addition of the vanilla and oak very well.

Double Dry-Hopped Mischief on Cask: as if Mischief wasn't hoppy enough, we've added fresh hops to this firkin. It's first dry hopped with centennial, sterling and summit and then again in the cask with cascade and liberty (both whole leaf). This one is a hop bomb – just the way we like it! We also will have Mischief back on draft.

For those of you who've been asking, we'll be making The Bruery's famous Liege waffles! If you haven't had one, this isn't your average waffle – coated in pearl sugar and caramelized to crispy perfection - you'll have to come try it to understand.

Also, this Friday night we'll have a brand new food truck for you to try! Brooklyn Boys NY Style Deli will be swinging by to serve up some traditional New York staples, like ½ lb. Peppered Pastrami sandwiches and matzo ball soup!

This weekend we'll be pouring:
Rugbrød (available for growler fills)
Mischief (available for growler fills)
Melange No. Sechs (Reserve Society growler fills)
Holiday Wine Cellar 45th Anniversary Imperial Porter
Saison De Lente (Reserve Society growler fills)
Double Dry Hopped Mischief on cask

We're super excited about this weekend and hope to see you there!

Worth Repeating?

“Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen.” (Ephesians 4:29)

Our speech matters to God. And as the Bible's Golden Rule says, "Do unto others what you would have them do to you" (Matthew 7:12). What we dish out will come back to us. We can be sure that if we have loose lips, our words will eventually return to haunt. I came across these words of wisdom this week and thought they might be worth repeating. I certainly hope to keep them in mind.

We should run our words, including prayer requests, through these two tests:

1) Is the news "approved" for sharing? It's easy to spread gossip under the guise of being well-meaning, even prefacing the news with "I wish you'd pray for … " But just because my "sharing" is well-meant doesn't mean it's appropriate.

2) Would I want this news shared about me? This is the real kicker. If I were sitting in a room with others blatantly talking about me, would I want what I had told them to be shared? Or would their chatter make me feel as though I'm in my underwear, and everyone's inspecting me?

Gently deflect a gossip-prone conversation before it gets off-track. Our speech really does matter to God [and to us].

Disclosure of their diagnosis impairs the social functioning of people with schizophrenia

People don't need to be treated as a stereotype for harm to occur; their mere belief that they could be viewed in a stereotyped fashion is enough - a phenomenon known as 'stereotype threat'. For example, women reminded of the stereotype that men are better at maths tend to perform more poorly in a subsequent maths task, even if they are actually treated fairly. Now Julie Henry and colleagues have extended this line of research to the domain of mental health. They've found that patients with a schizophrenia diagnosis function less well socially, when they think that the person they're chatting with knows their diagnosis.

Thirty people diagnosed with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder spent a few minutes chatting on their own to one research assistant and then they did the same with another assistant an hour later. There were a few points of deception: first, the participants were led to believe that the assistants were participants from another study. Also, most importantly, before one of the conversations began, they were told that the assistant knew about their diagnosis of schizophrenia; before the other, they were told the assistant did not know. They were also told, truthfully, that both the people they were to chat with did not themselves have a diagnosis of schizophrenia.

In reality, the research assistants didn't know whether each participant had a diagnosis of schizophrenia or not. This was achieved by having them chat to the participants diagnosed with schizophrenia plus a number of control participants. Crucially, they weren't told in advance who was who.

After each conversation, the research assistants rated the social behaviour of the person they'd just chatted with. The participants in turn rated the behaviour of the assistant they'd just chatted with and they said how they felt the conversation had gone.

The key finding is that the social functioning of the participants with schizophrenia seemed to deteriorate when they thought their conversational partner knew their diagnosis (even though they didn't). Specifically, when they thought their diagnosis had been disclosed, the participants were rated by the research assistants as being more impaired at initiating conversations and at switching topics appropriately, and the assistants also found these conversations less comfortable.

Henry's team can't be sure, but they think these apparent deficits emerged because the participants' concern about how they would be judged, in light of their diagnosis having been disclosed, interfered with their ability to converse in a more effective manner.

A further twist was that the participants with schizophrenia seemed unaware of these effects - they reported finding the conversations, in which they thought their diagnosis was known, just as comfortable and successful as when they thought their diagnosis had been kept hidden. This contrasts with non-clinical research on stereotype threat, in which people seem to be aware of the effects on their performance.

The results provide food for thought regarding when and how mental health diagnoses should be disclosed. The researchers said their findings suggest 'that one of the defining qualities of [schizophrenia] - social skill impairment - is not caused solely by the disorder per se, but rather, also derives from feelings of being stereotyped.'
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Henry, J., Hippel, C., & Shapiro, L. (2010). Stereotype threat contributes to social difficulties in people with schizophrenia. British Journal of Clinical Psychology, 49 (1), 31-41 DOI: 10.1348/014466509X421963

FML

#%#$^^&%#

half way uploading my video my laptop batt died.

when plugged in to charge, the video stopped uploading and refuse to continue.

reupload takes another 45 mins. F... dome internet sucks.

Going for meeting now.

Will upload when I get home


hmph.

Be Mindful To Be A Blessing

"Be extravagantly generous." (1 Timothy 6:18b, MSG)

"Be generous." (Ecclesiastes 11:1a, MSG)

"Generous hands are blessed hands because they give bread to the poor." (Proverbs 22:9, MSG)



I was at a restaurant the other day with a group of friends and something occurred to me about tipping. Suppose two customers walk in at the same time and are seated within moments. Customer #1 orders a sandwich and glass of water for a total of $3.99. Customer #2 orders a sandwich and soda for a total of $5.98. Both customers finish and receive their bills at the same time. Supposing that each customer tips the waiter/waitress 20%. Based on the bill total, customer #1's tip is $0.80 and customer #2's tip is $1.20. Here's the question: Was it easier for the waiter/waitress to serve customer 1 or customer 2? I say it was equal but look at the difference in the tip. Just makes you stop and think about basing your tip on generosity rather than the total of your bill.

Pretty nails and lost phone (still)

Thanks for commenting on my facebook and my blog. Now I know what fish these are. Cardinal fish. Right. *mental note*




Responsive readers are the best. ^^


So yesterday I just got back from Melaka after spending a nice weekend with my parents. We went out for dinner to "kinda" celebrate my Chinese birthday (birthday according to the lunar calendar).

Then they gave me a load of items for me to bring back to my new home in PJ, items include toaster, oven, drinks, ham, chocolates, toilet washing liquid, pail, snacks, cookies, etc. Parents are the best. ^^

Yesterday I also went to collect my blinged up nails. Instead of staying in a nail parlour for hours on end to do my nail, I've asked my favourite nail artist to do up a set of nails two weeks back and I was ready to try them on when I collected them yesterday.

It's so pretty!




photo doesn't do it justice and the color is much better than it shows here. More shine too. I asked her to add on the lace, and she did the 3D flowers for me, so creative!

Totally love it!

But last night when I arrived back home (PJ), I was carrying the stuff and it's been a long time since i have to handle delicate nails, so I was kinda being rather "rough" with my fingers, *pluck*, one fake nail came off, the right thumb.

And now it is no where to be seen. T_T

No fear, I just called my nail artist to make me another one (she still remembers my thumb nail size and length) and have her delivered it up to me by poslaju.

Woo hoo! I love my nail artist. She's the best.


Anyway, while at home, I looked for my blackberry everywhere but still couldn't find it. I'm beginning to wonder if anyone took it during Chinese New Year when there are a lot of relatives and people coming in and out of the house everyday, and my whole family was in Bangkok holidaying. (yea, we gave out our house for my sweet relatives to stay even when we're not there)

SIGH.

Damn emo ok.

I think I need to call in the SWAT team soon. Or spend an entire week upturning my room just to look for it. I know I kept it somewhere. It's there. damn it, I know it's there.

Just like how I know my lost nail is somewhere in my room. Unless there's a blackhole in there. hmph~


Speaking of Blackberry, last update about the Blackberry Access and its freaking big sale.

Pay RM2.50 per day (by subscribing it through SMS, type BB ON and send to 28882) for unlimited data on your Blackberry for 5 consecutive weekdays and get the weekend off for free. So I suggest you do this on a monday, then by Saturday, you can use your data for week till Sunday 11.59pm.

That's like paying RM12.50 for a whole week's of data. Quite affordable.

Best part is when you want to stop, like travel or something, you can just stop your usage for a week or two until you get back, it's prepaid, so there's nothing more convenient and cost saving than that.

Man, this makes me more emo.

Time to call in SWAT team.

Thirty years on - the babies judged negatively by their mothers

If a mother has a negative perception of her baby when it's just one month old, there's a strong possibility that same baby will have attachment problems as an adult, thirty or forty years later. That's the claim of a longitudinal study that recommends screening new mothers to see if they have a negative perception of their child, so that any necessary action can be taken to stop the transmission of attachment problems from mother to child.

Elsie Broussard and Jude Cassidy recruited twenty-six adults in the area of Pittsburgh, whose mothers had signed up to a longitudinal study up to forty years earlier. Back then, in the 60s and 70s, the mothers had been asked to rate their one-month-old babies on factors like crying, spitting, sleeping, feeding and predictability, and then do the same for the 'average baby'. Twelve of the babies were judged to be at risk because their mothers had rated them more negatively than an average baby. Back to the present, and the researchers interviewed the adults using the Adult Attachment Interview, which includes questions about memories of their childhood, their memories of separation and loss and whether they felt affected by their parents' behaviour. Based on these kinds of questions, the participants were classified as being securely or insecurely attached, the latter classification suggesting that they have ongoing problems forming healthy emotional attachments to other people.

The key finding is that 9 of the 12 adults who, so many years earlier, had been perceived negatively by their mothers were today classified as insecurely attached adults, compared with just 2 of the 14 adults who'd been positively perceived by their mothers. '...These findings reflect transmission from one individual's representational world to that of another,' the researchers said. In other words, the researchers believe that a mother who views her baby negatively has attachment problems and these problems tend to be passed onto that baby, even affecting his or her attachment style thirty or forty years later.

How could a negative attachment style be transmitted in this way? Apparently, earlier work in Broussard's lab showed that 'mothers with a negative perception of their infants had limited awareness of their infant's states, had difficulties recognising their infant's signals, and lacked a flexible and effective range of responses.' Moreover, the researchers surmised, babies with mothers who perceive them negatively may fail to come to see their mother as a secure base and may come to feel 'rejected and unloved, feelings that may contribute to an insecure state of mind [in adulthood] with respect to attachment.' Given their results, Broussard and Cassidy suggested more professional support be given to new mothers, especially during the critical early period between hospital discharge and the next contact with medical staff.

As with so many studies that look for effects of parenting on children, this study contains a serious confound that's barely touched upon by the researchers. The effects that Broussard and Cassidy attribute to parenting and attachment style could well be genetic. We're not surprised when the children of tall parents grow up to be tall. Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that the children of insecurely attached parents grow up to be insecurely attached themselves.
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Broussard, E., & Cassidy, J. (2010). Maternal perception of newborns predicts attachment organization in middle adulthood. Attachment & Human Development, 12 (1), 159-172 DOI: 10.1080/14616730903282464