Unique Serving Platter

The trend for yuppie products lasted all through the 1980s. Everyone had to have the latest gizmos. Suited young executives with their colored braces, organized their busy lives with the aid of professional organizers. You can still buy them today, but the peak of their popularity has passed.

It was a badge of respect, to be seen hurrying from appointment to appointment. Social engagements, to be worked around the fashionable wine bars, had to be arranged too. The professional organizers were a useful tool. They were bound books containing an appointment diary, addresses and phone numbers. They also had more general information like contact details for different organizations and time zones for various countries. There was currency information and the numbers for airports. Professional organizers were mostly used to store personal information.

People used them to make shopping lists, leave reminder notes and organize future commitments. There were more ambitious pages in professional organizers for thinking about projects. There were spaces for writing goals for the coming weeks and months. Writing these down, although they seldom came to fruition, made them feel more real. No self-respecting yuppie could be seen without one and we all wondered how we coped before their invention.

They varied in price, according to how many sections they contained and you could get replacement pages for them. The only problem was that you came to rely on them totally. All the information pertaining to your life from the address of your dentist to your notes from the latest, monthly sales meeting, was in professional organizers. Therefore, it was a catastrophe if you lost one. It was like your brain emptying or someone stealing all your filing cabinets. People would have preferred their wallets to go missing. I used them extensively and never lost one, thankfully. I dreaded it happening, though and I imagined it would be like losing my arm. Silly, of course, but that was the extent of my dependence on professional organizers at that time.

Today, there are electronic versions. It’s still keeping all the eggs in one basket, unless you duplicate the information elsewhere. It’s very handy, to carry around these portable marvels and tap in anything you want to. When you use electronic professional organizers, you must be careful about entering any sensitive material. Don’t leave it lying around for anyone to pick up. It’s nice to have something to make life easier. Just don’t lose it.

The book of the dead is actually a term that refers to two books. One of them is a Tibetan Book of the Dead, the other is an Egyptian one. Of the two, for some reason, the Egyptian one is far more popular among fans of world religions. I think it probably have to do that the Tibetan religion is still around, while the Egyptian religion has not been practiced for centuries. This makes it ancient and mysterious, and indeed there are many mysteries about the ancient Egyptians. There are things that we still do not know about the construction of their pyramids, or the way that they embalmed their dead. We do not know what lies beneath the earth under the Sphinx, as Egypt will not let scientists go under there no matter how many times that they ask. Given all of this mystery, it is no wonder that the Egyptian Book of the Dead is an object of so much fascination.

There actually is a lot that is known about the Egyptian Book of the Dead, in spite of all of the mysteries about ancient Nile delta civilization. The fact is that historians basically know what it is about, and anyone with an internet connection can easily get a copy any time that they want to. It is basically a record of what happens after the body dies, and a collection of prayers for the recently deceased. It is believed that the Book of the Dead would be chanted over the body of anyone who had enough money to hire the requisite priests for several days to help the deceased to reach a good afterlife. It must have been impressive to hear that chanting, for days on end, in a room filled with flickering candles and a pickled corpse. It is a rather unappetizing, yet oddly captivating image.

It is images like the chanting of the Book of the Dead that help to explain why it is that ancient Egyptian civilization is so popular. Really, you can see it almost everywhere. People will get tattoos of ancient Egyptian gods, shirts with pictures of the masks of pharaohs, and all other types of Egyptian paraphernalia. I am sure there are many people who own copies of the Book of the Dead just to make their coffee tables look cool. But if you are a mythology buff, the Book of the Dead has more to offer than just ambiance.