Hollywood Good

The Cookie Pastry:

· 1 lb self-raising flour
· 4 Tbsp sugar
· 2 Tbsp margarine
· 3 egg yolks
· milk or water (as required)
· 1 tsp vanilla essence
· ¼ tsp salt
 
Beat the margarine and sugar together in a bowl to a light and creamy consistency

Stir in the egg yolks and vanilla essence, taking care to blend well.
Sift the flour and the salt into the mixture, ensuring that it is thoroughly mixed.
Stir in enough milk or water so that a fairly stiff dough is formed.
Place the dough on a floured surface and roll out to a ¼ inch thickness. Cut into rounds with a cookie cutter.
Line a greased patty tin with the rounds of dough

The Cookie filling:

· 3 egg whites, stiffly beaten
· 2 cups desiccated coconut
· 1 cup sugar
· apricot jam

Gradually add the sugar to the beaten egg whites, beating well to blend.
Fold the coconut into the mixture and mix well.
Place a little apricot jam in the center of the rounds in the patties and spoon some of the coconut mixture over the jam.
Bake in the oven at 400o F for approximately 15 minutes. The pastry should be a light golden color.
Leave to cool slightly in the patty tin and then place on a rack and let the cookies cool completely.
Makes approximately 60 cookies. These may be stored in an airtight container for 2 weeks.

You'll find these cookies a real taste treat

Trust is what keeps our society functioning. Evolutionarily speaking, we must trust to survive. But it can be a slippery thing. What makes us trust people? And more curiously, what makes us trust some people but not others?

Expectation and Reciprocation

According to the “experts”—sociologists, psychologists, economists, political scientists—trust is based on expectation. To the degree you believe you can expect a certain response from someone, you trust him. To the degree you believe he will reciprocate at some point in the future in some (often undefined) way, you trust him. Of course, past experience—with the person in question or with others—will affect that confidence, but in the here and now, certain behaviors and visual cues can also influence if and how much you trust someone:

1. Familiarity. The more contact you have with someone, the more information you collect about him or her. The more information you have, the more confident you can be in your expectations.

2. Resemblance. If someone looks, dresses, or acts like you, you’re more likely to believe his or her actions and reactions will be similar to your own. A 2002 study at a Canadian university showed that people are more likely to trust someone whose facial features resemble theirs.

3. Consistency. The more someone behaves with consistency, the better you’re able to establish patterns and form expectations.

4. Punctuality. If someone is regularly on time, it not only signals consistency, but also general conscientiousness toward other people.

5. Flexibility. Social-exchange theorists have found that people are more likely to trust someone who does not try to explicitly negotiate or force a binding agreement. (Think of the last car salesman you encountered.)

6. Discretion. The ability to keep a secret and exercise tact will always inspire trust.

7. Transparency. The flip side of discretion is transparency. We want someone to keep our secrets, but not her own. Self-disclosure builds trust.

8. Competence. In the workplace, nothing inspires trust more than getting the job done right.

9. Engagement. Trust is based on an understood reciprocity. If someone does not even appear to invest in you, he likely doesn’t have much to lose in betraying you.

10. Face Time. Part of engaging is an effort to make “face time.” A recent study showed that people in the workplace are more likely to trust team members with whom they interact in person more than those they work with via email or videoconference.

11. Facial hair. Another recent study in the Journal of Marketing Communications found that consumers trust pitchmen with beards more than those without. There are limits, however, to the beard-trustworthiness theory. Graphic designer Matt McInerney was only halfway kidding when he made a graphic spectrum of “The Trustworthiness of Beards.”

12. Eye contact (but not too much). This is perhaps the biggest behavioral indicator of trustworthiness. But the quality of the eye contact, observes psychologist Elaine Ducharme, also matters. Is it steely or warm? Too much eye contact can be unnerving.

13. Handshake (not too firm, not too soft). Any businessperson can tell you the importance of a firm handshake in building confidence. However, like eye contact, there is a middle ground. Too firm suggests aggression; too soft suggests passivity.

14. Posture. No one trusts a slouch. A straight back projects an image of strength and confidence.

Two whales, a male and a female, were swimming side by side in the ocean.

Suddenly, the male whale spots a ship in the distance. He recognizes it as the whaling ship that killed his father. Filled with anger, he says to his female companion, "That's the ship that killed my father! Let's swim closer!"

When they were close enough, the male said, "Why don't we swim under the ship and blow air through our blow holes and break the ship into a million pieces?

That will be sweet revenge." And the female agreed to this.

So they each took a deep breath of air, swam under the ship, and blew

enormous amounts of air under the ship. The ship flew into the air and
crashed back to the sea and broke into a million pieces.

The pair of whales started to swim off when they realized that the
sailors were not dead, but clinging to pieces of wood and floating in
the ocean. The male whale was furious and said to the female whale,

"They're still alive, but I've got another idea.
Let's swim around and gulp up all the sailors!"

That's when the female stopped swimming, looked at the male and said,