Slick Beats - Το Ξέρεις Καλά

“Walk with the dreamers, the believers, the courageous, the cheerful, the planners, the doers, the successful people with their heads in the clouds and their feet on the ground. Let their spirit ignite a fire within you to leave this world better than when you found it...” 
― Wilferd Peterson

Katerina Vrana - Brilliant Greek Comedian

By Huge Demand MegaTV is bringing back Greek Tv !!

Karaoğlan - Teaser 2 (2013) "Official Teaser"

Whitney Houston's Horoscope: Life, Love, Success, Death

Cyprus banks under strict capital controls

The Cypriot capital of Nicosia resembled the set of a Hollywood heist film this morning. Hours before banks re-opened in Cyprus, the city was swarming with helicopters and heavily armed police, as container trucks full of euros were ferried to branch offices that had been closed for 10 days.

The banks re-opened at noon Cyprus time (10 am GMT, 6 am ET) under strict capital controls designed to prevent an exodus of cash that would undo the work of eurozone policymakers and the IMF, who signed a bailout deal with Cyprus on Sunday evening. Customers will be limited to 300 euros a day in cash withdrawals, and cash checking will be banned. The Cyprus central bank will review all commercial transactions over 5,000 euros and individual transactions of 200,000 euros or more; people leaving Cyprus can take no more than 3,000 euros with them.

The scenes outside banks was mostly quiet, with reporters outnumbering customersin many cases. Wall Street Journal/Dow Jones reporter Matina Stevis tweeted: “Hack to old lady: ‘are you tying to get money out?’ Old lady to hack: ‘it’s none of your business.’”

http://qz.com/68104/under-heavy-guard-and-capital-controls-cyprus-banks-prepare-to-open-their-doors/

Big Bang Theory full panel UNEDITED

S'agapo - Glykeria

Drink Greek Coffee - Live longer

Gerasimos Siasos, a professor at the University of Athens Medical School, and colleagues set out to discover the secrets of the inhabitants of the Greek island Ikaria – home to the highest rates of longevity in the world. While only 0.1 percent of all Europeans live to be 90 years of age, the number of Ikaria residents who are at leastnonagenarians is ten times that amount.

While many researchers have studied the island’s elderly residents seeking Ikaria’s proverbial fountain of youth, Siasos set out to investigate if the secret was the boiled Greek coffee that they regularly imbibe. He and his associates set out to determine what impact that their special blend of the popular caffeinated beverage had on the health of the island’s populace. Specifically, whether or not there was a correlation between it and the subjects’ endothelial function.

The endothelium is a thin layer of cells that line the interior surface of blood vessels throughout a person’s circulatory system. They are often affected by aging and by specific lifestyle habits (including smoking), the researchers explained. Recent research has suggested that moderate coffee consumption on a regular basis could positively affect multiple aspects of endothelial health, as well as reducing a person’s risk of coronary heart disease.

For their study, Siasos and his colleagues randomly selected 71 men and 71 women who were over the age of 65 and had lived on Ikaria for their entire lives. Each was put through a battery of health checks in order to make sure that they did not suffer from diabetes, high blood pressure, or similar ailments. Their endothelial function was also tested, and all subjects completed a questionnaire to provide details about their medical backgrounds, their lifestyle information and their coffee-drinking habits.

More than 87 percent of those who responded to those questionnaires said that they drank boiled Greek coffee every day, and those individuals tended to have better endothelial function than those who consumed other varieties of coffee, the researchers discovered. Furthermore, even in patients who had high blood pressure, there was a correlation between drinking the boiled version of the caffeinated beverage and improved endothelial function.

“Boiled Greek type of coffee, which is rich in polyphenols and antioxidants and contains only a moderate amount of caffeine, seems to gather benefits compared to other coffee beverages,” Siasos said in a statement. While the study suggests that boiled Greek coffee could have cardiovascular health benefits, the researchers caution that additional studies will be required to determine the exact beneficial mechanisms of the beverage on a person’s wellbeing.

http://www.redorbit.com/news/health/1112805943/greek-coffee-linked-to-longevity-031913/

March 27, 2013 - Full moon in Libra

Love is not blind - Love is an addiction

Love is not blind - it sees more, not less. But because it sees more, it is willing to see less.

Rabbi Julius Gordon

"We are never so helplessly unhappy as when we lose love."
Sigmund Freud

"Platonic love is like an inactive volcano."
Andre Pevost

"To love someone is to see a miracle invisible to others."
Francois Mauriac

"To love is to receive a glimpse of heaven."
Karen Sunde

"There is no remedy for love but to love more."

Henry David Thoreau

"A heart that loves is always young."
A Greek Proverb

"Seduce my mind and you can have my body,
Find my soul and I'm yours forever."
Anonymous

"I have loved to the point of madness;
That which is called madness,
That which to me,
Is the only sensible way to love."
F. Sagan

Love, love me do

Scanning the brains of people in love is also helping to refine science's grasp of love's various forms. Helen Fisher, a researcher at Rutgers University, and the author of a new book on love*, suggests it comes in three flavours: lust, romantic love and long-term attachment. There is some overlap but, in essence, these are separate phenomena, with their own emotional and motivational systems, and accompanying chemicals. These systems have evolved to enable, respectively, mating, pair-bonding and parenting.

Lust, of course, involves a craving for sex. Jim Pfaus, a psychologist at Concordia University, in Montreal, says the aftermath of lustful sex is similar to the state induced by taking opiates. A heady mix of chemical changes occurs, including increases in the levels of serotonin, oxytocin, vasopressin and endogenous opioids (the body's natural equivalent of heroin). “This may serve many functions, to relax the body, induce pleasure and satiety, and perhaps induce bonding to the very features that one has just experienced all this with”, says Dr Pfaus.

Then there is attraction, or the state of being in love (what is sometimes known as romantic or obsessive love). This is a refinement of mere lust that allows people to home in on a particular mate. This state is characterised by feelings of exhilaration, and intrusive, obsessive thoughts about the object of one's affection. Some researchers suggest this mental state might share neurochemical characteristics with the manic phase of manic depression. Dr Fisher's work, however, suggests that the actual behavioural patterns of those in love — such as attempting to evoke reciprocal responses in one's loved one — resemble obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD).

That raises the question of whether it is possible to “treat” this romantic state clinically, as can be done with OCD. The parents of any love-besotted teenager might want to know the answer to that. Dr Fisher suggests it might, indeed, be possible to inhibit feelings of romantic love, but only at its early stages. OCD is characterised by low levels of a chemical called serotonin. Drugs such as Prozac work by keeping serotonin hanging around in the brain for longer than normal, so they might stave off romantic feelings. (This also means that people taking anti-depressants may be jeopardising their ability to fall in love.) But once romantic love begins in earnest, it is one of the strongest drives on Earth. Dr Fisher says it seems to be more powerful than hunger. A little serotonin would be unlikely to stifle it.

Wonderful though it is, romantic love is unstable — not a good basis for child-rearing. But the final stage of love, long-term attachment, allows parents to co-operate in raising children. This state, says Dr Fisher, is characterised by feelings of calm, security, social comfort and emotional union.

Because they are independent, these three systems can work simultaneously — with dangerous results. As Dr Fisher explains, “you can feel deep attachment for a long-term spouse, while you feel romantic love for someone else, while you feel the sex drive in situations unrelated to either partner.” This independence means it is possible to love more than one person at a time, a situation that leads to jealousy, adultery and divorce — though also to the possibilities of promiscuity and polygamy, with the likelihood of extra children, and thus a bigger stake in the genetic future, that those behaviours bring. As Dr Fisher observes, “We were not built to be happy but to reproduce.”

The second surprise was that the brain areas active in love are different from the areas activated in other emotional states, such as fear and anger. Parts of the brain that are love-bitten include the one responsible for gut feelings, and the ones which generate the euphoria induced by drugs such as cocaine. So the brains of people deeply in love do not look like those of people experiencing strong emotions, but instead like those of people snorting coke. Love, in other words, uses the neural mechanisms that are activated during the process of addiction. “We are literally addicted to love,” Dr Young observes.

http://www.oxytocin.org/oxytoc/love-science.html

The Greek Revolution

The Greek Revolution was not an isolated event; numerous failed attempts at regaining independence took place throughout the history of the Ottoman era. Throughout the 17th century there was great resistance to theOttomans in the Morea and elsewhere, as evidenced by revolts led by Dionysius the Philosopher.^[7] After theMorean War, the Peloponnese came under Venetian rule for 30 years, and remained in turmoil from then on and throughout the 17th century, as the bands of klephts multiplied.^[8]

The first great uprising was the Russian-sponsored Orlov Revolt of the 1770s, which was crushed by the Ottomans after having limited success. After the crushing of the uprising, Muslim Albanians ravaged many regions in mainland Greece.^[9] However, the Maniots continually resisted Ottoman rule, and defeated several Ottoman incursions into their region, the most famous of which was the invasion of 1770.^[10] During the Second Russo-Turkish War, the Greek community of Trieste financed a small fleet under Lambros Katsonis, which was a nuisance for the Ottoman navy; during the war klephts and armatoloi rose once again.^[11]

At the same time, a number of Greeks enjoyed a privileged position in the Ottoman state as members of the Ottoman bureaucracy. Greeks controlled the affairs of the Orthodox Church through the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, as the higher clergy of the Orthodox Church was mostly of Greek origin. Thus, as a result of the Ottoman millet system, the predominantly Greek hierarchy of the Patriarchate enjoyed control over the Empire's Orthodox subjects (the Rum milleti^[12]).^[4]

The Greek Orthodox Church played a pivotal role in the preservation of national identity, the development of Greek society and the resurgence of Greek nationalism.^iii[›] From the 18th century and onwards, members of prominent Greek families in Constantinople, known as Phanariotes (after the Phanar district of the city) gained considerable control over Ottoman foreign policy and eventually over the bureaucracy as a whole.^[13]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_War_of_Independence

Theodoros Vryzakis - March 25,1821

Theodoros Vryzakis
 (1814–1878)
Theodoros Vryzakis (oil painting, 1852, Benaki Museum, Athens)


 illustrates Bishop Germanos of old Patras blessing the Greek banner at Agia Lavra on the outset of the national revolt against the Turks on 25 March 1821.