Articles Archive
All articles by Athena Sydney are categorised and listed alphabetically with links to other websites where the articles have been published. There are articles in the following categories: Health and Living, Humour, Multimedia Reviews, New Age, People, World Affairs & Writing.
Health and Living Articles
A Common Illness in Women
One in every five women will encounter it once in her lifetime: a urinary tract infection. Learn more about the symptoms and what you can do to prevent one.
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Consuming Less & Cutting Costs
Now that the economy has hit a slump, and consumer prices still seem to be skyrocketing, we keep hearing about those who seriously started cutting their costs by being more critical in their consuming habits. Cutting costs is profitable for yourself, in other words it saves you money, and it benefits the environment as well. How can you save money and still live comfortably? How can you stretch that dollar so your paycheck will get you through the month?
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Montezuma's Revenge
Athena Sydney has travelled quite a bit, and encountered Montezuma's Revenge, a problem everyone has had to deal with at one time or another: traveller’s diarrhoea, also known as Montezuma’s Revenge. With the upcoming summer holidays it is good to be aware of the risks, the prevention and the treatment of this problem.
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Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy
Statistics show that 2 to 5% of patients that have had an accident or surgery to an extremity develop RSD. In the Netherlands alone, 8000 new patients are diagnosed with RSD on a yearly basis. Unfortunately there are a lot of cases world-wide that go undiagnosed.
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When pregnancy becomes terror
HELLP stands for Hemolysis, Elevated Liver enzymes and Low Platelets; it is a unique and severe variant of preeclampsia, also called toxaemia, which can be fatal to both mother and child.
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Humour Articles
Cleopatra; An Ass a Day Keeps Old Age away
Fact or fiction: Cleopatra's secret to youthful beauty was ass milk. You asked for humour! Join Tanya Irvin and Athena Sydney in this bold and daring dose of humour.
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Multimedia Reviews
And the winner is...
Billy Crystal is brilliant with his songs, especially the one on the Lord of the Rings had me rolling on the floor laughing my ass off. But, it's close to 3 am here... let's get this show on the road please?
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Book Review: Eager to Please
Irish author Julie Parsons tells an intriguing tale in this book Eager to Please. It is the story of Rachel Beckett, a talented architect convicted to life imprisonment for the murder of her husband, a policeman. During her trial, she kept repeating the story that her lover Daniel, her husband’s adopted brother, was the one who shot her husband Martin, yet Daniel had an airtight alibi for the time of the murder. Rachel serves twelve years of her sentence and in this time in prison she keeps denying she killed her husband; then after twelve years, Rachel is paroled after she finally claims to be sorry for killing her husband.
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Book Review: Seeker
Unlike the first nine books of this series, this story is told as seen through the eyes of Hunter Niall - in the first volumes the story is written from Morgan Rowlands' point of view. Although these books are for teenagers, I have really grown to like them since I got my hands on the first volume; they deal with the life of a teenage girl discovering she is adopted and how she finds her heritage and discovers her magickal powers and the craft in the process.
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Film Review: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
In Harry’s third year at Hogwarts School for Wizardry and Witchcraft his life is in danger once again. A convicted murderer called Sirius Black has escaped from the wizard’s prison of Azkaban, and the wizardry world is convinced he will come after Harry. Yet this is not the only peril our young hero faces – since Black’s escape the guards of Azkaban, the Dementors, have been released into the world to capture the dangerous criminal. These creatures are supposed to protect Hogwarts, but instead they display an unusual interest in Harry to the point where it may actually cost him his life. Fortunately, Harry has a new Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher, Remus Lupin, who comes to his rescue on several occasions.
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Film Review: Love Actually
Since I am a sucker for his British accent and boyish charm, any film that stars Hugh Grant is worth seeing in my humble opinion, except maybe “An awfully big adventure”, but that would of course be a matter of taste. Tonight I went to see “Love Actually” from the makers of “Four Weddings and a Funeral”, “Bridget Jones’ Diary” and “Notting Hill”. The film proclaims to be the ultimate romantic comedy of 2003, yet it is so much more.
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Film Review: Twin Sisters
Two six-year-old girls, twin sisters Anna and Lotte Bamberg, are separated by family members after their father dies of tuberculosis in 1922. Lotte is ill, so the family members who had their eyes on the children told the relatives from the Netherlands they could take the ‘sick one’. During the funeral, the girls are torn apart, Anna stays behind in Germany to ‘help’ out on the farm, while Lotte recovers from tuberculosis in the Netherlands.
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Goodbye Friends
After ten years of sharing everything in their lives, it pains me to see them go. Unfortunately I have no other choice than to let them go, because they’re calling it quits. My friends in New York city are gone from my life.
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New Age Articles
Demystifying the myth about dangerous gemstones
Some gemstones are thought to bring its wearer ill luck, what is true and what is a myth? Athena Sydney takes a look at a few of these gemstones.
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People Articles
Hell hath no fury...
Tomorrow is Friday the 13th, a day when some people don't even want to consider getting out of bed. If you've had a week like mine, I'm sure you'd be interested in spending it in lock-up or in your own bed.
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Rehabilitating Seals
The SRRC is a non-profit organisation that will house lost baby seals until they are over a certain weight, thirty-five kilograms which is approximately seventy-seven pounds. Howlers are baby seals that have lost their mothers somehow and they cannot survive on their own. Even though mother seals look after their babies, it is possible mother and baby are separated by a storm or through an event that causes panic. The SRRC also takes care of sick and injured seals, until they are healed.
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St. Nicholas, Santa Claus, Sinterklaas or Wodan?
St. Nicholas was born in 280 in the Turkish village Patara. After losing his parents to the plague, Nicholas devoted his vast inheritance to charity. He later became the bishop of Myra in Turkey. While Nicholas was bishop of Myra, the surrounding lands were struck by terrible famine. Nicholas was concerned about the people of his diocese and he obtained a miraculous supply of bread for them
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World Affairs Articles
Absinthe - the Green Fairy or the Green Poison?
Absinthe, also known as the Green Fairy (La Fée Verte), the Green Muse or the Green Goddess by its devotees, has been said to drive people insane. It was said to induce hallucinations and make one psychotic. At the beginning of the twentieth century absinthe was placed on the forbidden liquor list throughout most of Europe after a Swiss absinthe drinker, Jean Lanfray, from Commugny took an axe and murdered his wife and children in 1906.
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Barbie for President
This forty-five year-old belle may be the most qualified American for the job of president of the United States. I mean, who can say she’s held more than one hundred different jobs. From doctor to astronaut, from fashion designer to army pilot, and from dentist to witch; Barbie’s done it all and quite successfully.
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Bush and Abstinence
According to the White House, the goal of the Federal policy should be to emphasise abstinence as the only certain way to avoid both unintended pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases. While in fact this is the truth, we need to think about this in a rational manner. Will propagating abstinence reduce the number of teenagers having sex?
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Club Sandwiches not Seals
Every year, hundreds of thousands of seals are killed, and the Canadian government allows this massive slaughter of marine mammals on their shores. In fact, when the quota of seals is exceeded, the government raises it. In 2001, the Canadian government issued 11,185 Commercial Sealing Licenses; this excludes the Provincial Hunting Licenses and Hunting Capability Certificates. Any of these three allows the owner to hunt for seals.
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Cold-blooded murder or death per request?
On Wednesday December 3, 2003 the weirdest trial in German history commenced, the court case against 42-year-old Armin Meiwes, the German answer to Jeffrey Dahmer, a homosexual cannibal. With one exception maybe, Meiwes’ victim agreed on being murdered and eaten by the suspect as opposed to Dahmer’s victims who were totally ignorant on what was going to happen to them.
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France Unveiled
The French government recently proposed a law, which will ban the Islamic headdress, the hajib, and other conspicuous religious symbols, like the Jewish yamulka and the Christian crucifix, from French state schools. President Jacques Chirac has publicly supported the proposal of this law last Wednesday, in a speech he stated this new law should take effect at beginning of the next school year.
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Hidden Genocide
One and a half million people perished and we barely know anything about it. The fact that the entire Armenian population was eradicated from their homeland by 1922 was not mentioned in any of my history books as far as I can recall. From 1894 to 1896 a series of massacres were carried out by Sultan Abdul-Hamid II, to eradicate the Christian Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire. In 1895, between 100,000 and 300,000 civilians, mostly men, were killed; the women were left behind to die of starvation, often after being raped by Turkish guards. The men who survived were tied together and thrown in the river, then, Turkish guards would fire a bullet into one of them, after which the dead body would drag the rest of the men down, condemning them to drowning.
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How can something so sweet taste so wrong?
It’s a proven fact that chocolate makes you feel good; cocoa contains phenyl ethylamine (PEA), which is an internal stimulant and antidepressant. The effects of phenyl ethylamine are similar to epinephrine and amphetamines, and this explains why people feel better after eating chocolate, and why it is so addictive. It is no wonder that chocolate is exchanged between lovers, or that those who are feeling down ingest it. I have to admit, I’m one of those people; chocolate is my pick-me-up, my friend in times of trouble.
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Interview with D.K. Dalton on the use of Steel-Jaw Traps
One of the many people fighting for the abolishment of steel-jaw traps is author D.K. Dalton. Read what you can do to get the steel-jaw traps abolished and what a humane trap looks like in this interview.
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Is your body really yours?
Despite a US Supreme Court ruling in June 2000 finding a similar bill proposal unconstitutional, president Bush of the United States of America signed the so-called Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003 on November 5, which completed the enactment of the first federal abortion ban, Roe versus Wade, thirty years ago.
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Serial Killers
The serial killer as a phenomenon is not something that started with Jack the Ripper in 1888, although he was probably one of the first known serial killers worldwide. The fact that the Ripper’s identity has remained a secret for more than a century makes him an enigma. It is a puzzle that still remains to be solved, although Patricia Cornwell has recently published a novel ‘Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper – Case Closed’ naming the Victorian painter Walter Richard Sickert as the infamous Jack who killed 5 prostitutes in London.
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Sky Marshalls and Other Measures
In their everlasting fight against terrorism, the United States of America have decided there are several things that are not done on international and intercontinental flights: “The US transportation security administration has notified all airlines that passengers are not allowed to congregate in groups by toilets into American airspace,” reports the Guardian in the United Kingdom.
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Thai Justice: When aquittal becomes life imprisonment
Innocent or guilty, most suspects are kept in jail for years before their cases finally reach the courtroom. And even then, when prisoners finally get to be trialed, they are subject to the whimsical moods of the Thai judge presiding over their cases. There have been reports of someone sentenced to three years in prison for a minor traffic violation. However those suspected of smuggling drugs usually face death by machine gun, or in some cases life imprisonment for pleading guilty to the charges.
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Thursday, Bloody Thursday
On Thursday March 11, 2004, a series of ten bombs went off at three major Madrid train stations during rush hour, killing 200 and injuring 1,400. Within the first hours after the explosions, the Spanish Prime Minister José Maria Aznar stated he believed the Basque separatist group ETA was behind the almost simultaneous blasts.
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United States not bound by international torture laws
In January 2002, the US government announced they would not abide by the 1949 Geneva Convention on the treatment of those captured in Afghanistan and Pakistan. One has to wonder though, why don’t the international rules apply to the United States? The US government explained that the prisoners taken in Afghanistan and Pakistan are not actually prisoners of war, but ‘unlawful combatants’.
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Violence in Schools
Violence in schools seems to be the order of the day nowadays; children carry knives, sometimes even guns and don’t turn away from using them. Ever since the bloodbath in the Dunblane Primary School in Scotland on March 13, 1996, we seem to hear more and more about this kind of violence.
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Writing Articles
Inspiration
Then suddenly, I saw her. The painting that spoke to me; she was amazing, painted with rough strokes. In its rawness it was a unique piece. For minutes, I stood in awe of this painted woman, the pain so clearly visible on her face and I could feel it too. The artist who made this amazing painting really captured the essence of the woman scorned.
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An Interview with author Elizabeth Hand
"It was frightening and inexplicable, and, over time, enraging. There used to be a clock at Dupont Circle, the AIDS clock, that would flash how many people had died; you'd see the pink triangle sigil SILENCE=DEATH and wonder, “How can this be real?” Something so terrifying was occurring, and the government and medical establishment refused to mobilize against it - and we were in the nation's Capital! It was like someone had yelled “Fire!” in a crowded theater, and the politics were blocking the exits."
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Writing Magick
If you look at television shows like ‘Charmed’ and ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’, you’d think writing about magickal characters is easier than anything else. But is it? For me it wasn’t.
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