As I have started writing about fun stuff, today I am going to write about one of my favorite funs which is paintball.
Paintball draws a wide array of players and can be played either indoors or outdoors. If you haven't ever played, it's basically like a real war and you are like a soldier with a gun! But you are shooting piantballs instead of bullets, which are simply balls filled with paint.
I actually remember once somebody had an idea about having a free gas station ! That's right, you could get free gas there. However, there were cameras and paintball guns controlled by people who could go to a website, see you and shoot you with paintball guns installed around the gas station! It never happened because in that state no artificial flying object was allowed.
Well, you can find all the stuff you need for paintball on internet. There is an online paintball store called Ultimate Paintball. They sell all well-known brands like Tippmann, Spyder, Smart Parts, Dye, Empire, Draxxus paintball gear plus many more brands which you can find on their website. The top selling guns they provide are - Tippmann A-5, Tippmann 98 Custom, Smart Parts Ion, Spyder Pilot ACS. If you really like to get a good brand like spyder paintball check them out.
I got the picture above from their website. That is a paintball gun. Its 2-in-1 trigger and it can deliver up to 30 balls-per-second! Wow! If I go paintballing in California I will write about it and I will add pictures.
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Let's go paintballing!
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
destination: California
There are many events occurring in California and so it's always nice to know about the special travel offers for California . When I want to travel , most of the time I use "travelocity" and this time I found a very special offer on it for the destination of California. It is called Golden Getaways: California Hotels from $95 . It is not really easy to find a cheap hotel in California any way, so I thought I share it with you. They have a very handy search tool that I always use, I put that here also:
Sunday, February 24, 2008
Goji juice market and many questions.
When I was writing the last post, I noticed the fact that there are so many websites out there about Goji that seems ridiculous. Since that time I was looking for the reason and now everything is clear to me. I found this interesting TV show from CBC which clearly explains the reason. Goji juice is being sold in Canada for $50 a bottle. It's not a product you can find in every grocery stores, but apparently it's being distributed through the famous pyramid marketing and word of mouth. So if you sell it you get commission and if the person who bought it from you sells it to somebody else you get smaller commissions again and that person receives his commission also.
The person behind all this story claims some fact about the Goji juice which is not proven scientifically yet. Even if the fruit might have some nice properties, that doesn't mean the juice keeps those properties too. There is also some doubt about the degree of this person.
Here is a comment by a person for that CBC show which got my attention: "I know someone who started taking the [Goji] berries last summer. He has convinced everyone he knows that they are the most amazing berry every known to man. I mentioned that I've searched the internet for studies on the berries and couldn't find any real studies. He said 'oh, yeah, there are tons of studies'. All I could find were 'studies' published by the people who are selling these outrageously expensive berries. Some of the claims he has made to me: - weight loss - 200% boost to sex drive - more energy - liver cleanse - better eyesight - 25,000 times more antioxidants than in a blueberry(!) - very high in fiber - many more He has his children taking them, which bothers me because they aren't making an informed choice in what they are eating / drinking".
Well, I myself never claim any health fact. In fact, these guys are claiming something not proven and that is just to fill their pockets. I liked the show and I recommend watching it to anybody who likes to know about a product before buying it, specially when that is something related to health and lifestyle.
Healthy lifestyle with Goji berries.
Goji berry is popularly known as Himalayan Goji berry. Grown in the Himalayan regions of Tibet and Mongolia, these small oblong-shaped bright red berries are one of the most nutrient-rich plant foods on earth. There are many claims on the effects of Goji berries on cancer cells. However, I couldn't find any scientific proof about it. Depending on the brand, goji berries are sold at health food stores in Canada from: $10.99 for a 100-gram bag to $19.99 for 500 grams (dried berries). As it's an expensive fruit, I guess there should be a huge market out there for it.
US Department of Agriculture has recently rated Goji berry as No 1 on the ORAC scale (Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity). The scale was developed to measure the antioxidant level in foods and, the higher the score, the more capable that food is of destroying the free radicals that cause cancer and speed up the aging process. Goji berries scored a spectacular 25,300 per 100g, while prunes, which came second, had a mere 5,770 per 100g.
What is a superfruit?
Exotic fruits with exceptional nutrient richness, antioxidant quality and novel taste are called superfruits. "Superfruit" is actually a marketing term first used in the food and beverage industry in 2005. Commonly mentioned superfruits are acai, blueberry, cranberry, goji, grape, guarana, mangosteen, noni, pomegrenate, sea-buckthorne.
The idea of superfruits is related to the market.This is basically how they shape the fruit market. For example, no body knew about blueberries that much until they figured out that its number one in antioxidants (which work as anti-cancer). So they started a market based on that and kept telling people about this anticancer thing. That's how blueberry got its market. Superfruits have many interesting properties that I will discuss them one by one each.
By the way, I recommended using Guava to my wife as it has calcium and iron.
Qumana
I am not sure if you have ever used any of desktop blog editors out there. I did a search about free blog editors which are compatible with windows and I have selected the one I am now writing this post with: Qumana. The whole point about using a desktop editor is its effect on saving your time. If you are writing in more than one blog it helps you manage them all without the need to enter your usernames and passwords.
Starting with Qumana was easy. My email was asked for download and I could download the file easily. It was installed easily too. I had to add my blog URL and my blogger username and password and that was it. It was in! It shows my posts with a toolbar containing New Post, Refresh Posts and Add Blog icons. If you have a self hosted blog then it can support that also. When you are done with writing, you may use its spell check and publish the post. So that was my first post using Qumana.
Friday, February 22, 2008
Healthy body with Guava fruit
It's still absolutely cold here in Canada, however we are lucky that we can find any kind of fruit we want in the grocery stores. I was walking in a FoodBasic store where I noticed some Guavas. Guava is the juicy, pink, sliced fruit in the center of the picture above.
Guava is an exotic fruit having exceptional antioxidant quality like blueberries, black beans and broccoli. Guava's antioxidant content ranked just below that of blueberries, which is No. 1 in antioxidant activity. Other fruits ranking surprisingly high were carambola, lychee, mango and papaya [ref]. Its extremely rich in vitamins A, B and C. A single guava fruit contains more vitamin C than a typical citrus fruit. The rind alone contains over five times more vitamin C than an orange. It also contains high amounts of calcium – which is unusual in a fruit. The whole fruit is edible, from seeds to rind. Guava contains high amounts of calcium.
Guavas are cholesterol, saturated and sodium free, plus low in fat and calories. Guavas are high in fiber. Guava is a source of iron too.
There are many kinds of Guavas: Thai Maroon, Green, Ripe, Indonesian, etc. There are actually about 100 species of Guavas. Guava juice is popular in South Africa and Egypt.
Guava can be eaten raw, but you may use them in some foods also. There are innumerable recipes for utilizing guavas in pies, cakes, puddings, sauce, ice cream, jam, butter, marmalade, chutney, relish, catsup, and other products. I will write about some recipes later.
source of image: Wikimedia
Thursday, February 21, 2008
Adding mybloglog
I am adding MyBlogLog to Health and Fruit. That way we can become friends also! If you like to use it for your blog, you just need a Yahoo username and password. Then visit mybloglog and simply register your blog. You need to prove that that is your blog. So you can publish a post like me with a html code provided by mybloglog to claim the ownership. Good luck with it!
Health and Fruit in search engines , part 3
If you look at the sidebar of this blog you see a service I am using called FEEDJIT. This is very useful. First of all you can see where the visitors are coming from. You can track them geographically and you are able to see the site they left beore entering Health and Fruit. Another reason I use FEEDJIT is that it helps your posts to appear in search engines very quickly. You basically do not need to wait for a long time that your weblog shows up in search engines then.
FEEDJIT itself is a highly visited website . So when you publish a post, you may get some visitors coming directly from FEEDJIT website also. It's a useful tool and it's free anyway!
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
place of this weblog in search engines - part 2
I mentioned the fact that this blog is among the first 10 results when you search for "health and fruit". The first page which shows up is called the fruit pages. It basically provides information about fruits. The second page is a Canadian governmental web page about " unpasteurized fruit juice and cider". It actually compare pasteurized and unpasteurized fruit juice in terms of the illnesses that the latter may cause. I will write about this page later. I noticed that there are some visitors arriving from Google image searches. That means people even like the pictures in this blog. These are all good news any way.
Place of this weblog in search engines - part 1
I thought it might be a good idea to write few posts about how this blog appears in search engines. We had only few posts, however, those posts brought a lot of attention. First of all , the word "health" receives about 2,170,000,000 results in Google. The word "fruit" shows 191,000,000 places. However, there are only 7,080,000 results for "Health and Fruit". This blog's place is among the first 10 results if you search "health and fruit". That's why this blog got a lot of visitors without any effort. That sounds interesting. That is a big motivation for me to keep writing.
I am back again!!
After a long delay in the posts, I am back again. We will move to a better place anyway! But till that time, I keep writing here. It was brought to my attention that this blog got a lot of readers. I will explain that in a separate post.
