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MLM – possibly the three most familiar letters to people first contemplating a small home business. It stands for multi-level marketing, of course, long a colorful mainstay of American entrepreneurship. But exactly what is it? Why is it so often reviled – and so persistently existent?

To put it simply for purposes of illustration, MLM is nothing more than a networking theory as applied to direct sales. Networking theory concerns, naturally, networks, or the connections between points. These points, or nodes, are for purposes of our discussion each individual salesman or woman.

Let’s say you’ve got a product to sell. You recruit two individuals to sell it, but as opposed to basically offering a very high commission on each unit sold, they have to “kick up” a certain percentage of the profits to you. They in turn recruit two other people each under the same terms.

Those two recruit still others, still under those terms. As could be imagined, with enough people working in your network, you’ll no longer have to do any selling yourself! And neither will those who have a good-sized network under them.

This is the beauty of it all; at some crucial “boiling point,” your network almost takes on a life of its own. There are lots of variations to this basic idea, but all such systems work on these general premises. The worldwide web, being itself a network, perfectly complements this type of a business.

And so it’s that many would-be entrepreneurs have taken to network marketing with quite a passion, because the nature of the new medium is such that one’s reach is exponentially extended – and it is all about the numbers in this game. Recruit enough individuals under you and you simply collect money! Many make a living doing just this, with moderate to extravagant incomes.

No kitchen is complete without having a complete set of common kitchen utensils for instance knives, spatulas, sieves, and so forth. At times it may be open to interpretation what is a utensil and what’s more properly considered equipment (in the sense of “hardware”) when it involves something like fancy electric eggbeaters and pots and pans, but most people seem to consider a utensil anything that may be held in the hand, requiring no countertop or other such support in order to use properly.

Some will even classify kitchen timers and cooking thermometers as kitchen utensils, along with hand-operated can openers and corkscrews. Cooling racks, cookie sheets, and measuring cups and spoons are also usually considered utensils. But whatever the taxonomy, there is no denying that anyone who cooks will require them.

Unless of course you plan to never bake or in any other case work with flour, you’ll need a rolling pin. And even though a knife is a knife, it is often easier to use kitchen shears instead.

And even when a knife is the right tool for the job, various types of knives are designed for specific tasks, such as those with serrated edges for especially tough (and likely rough!) cuts, while fruits could really use the gentler paring knife.

It might also be more helpful to get multiple sets of a certain utensil, for instance measuring spoons or cups, so that you needn’t constantly wash your only one while cooking. It’s also probably desirable to own more than one kind of spatula – not only in various sizes to handle different loads, but also of different constructions, made out of different materials or made according to different designs, for example rubbery coating and hard plastic or solid and with holes, respectively.

Lastly, it is also advisable to put quality ahead of quantity – better to own two really good knives than seven mediocre ones!

During the early eighties, computers were billed as something like educational toys. Some kids desired them, but only a few parents fully understood the point. The world, see, had not yet undergone the personal computing revolution then.

Computer systems had not taken over businesses, becoming an essential tool of everyday business; there were still whole divisions of expert typists who did practically nothing all day but create paperwork for other departments. Had a bill? Someone typed it up. Have to send a letter? Someone typed it up.

And so getting a computer back then was like getting educational toys for Christmas – or so many unsuspecting parents thought. They may have read something about the coming computer revolution and vaguely comprehended that such electronics are going to be somehow essential to the world in a few years, however it’s doubtful the common buyer thought much about it. No, it was the kids who clammored – and how educational could the thing be if kids were voluntarily, even passionately, asking for it?

Asking, demanding – rarely the behavior of children in relation to many educational toys! And certainly, for many kids, the personal computer became nothing more than a glorified videogaming machine, a home arcade.

To be sure, a much wider range of entertainment software was obtainable for computer platforms than on the game consoles of the era, a distinction which persists, though less greatly, today. But make no mistake: the ultimate use the majority of kids got out of a home computer system at the time was electronic entertainment.

Fortunately for a few, however, having a computer within the home – it was generally shared between siblings – lead to occupations in information technology. For these individuals, the early fascination with computers has endured, maturing into jobs creating software, installing hardware, supervising networks. For their parents, a computer was truly the investment in their children initially envisioned.

Affiliate marketing is really a method of promotion whereby independent contractors, so to speak, are employed to help publicize a product or service. Such work is carried out on a commission-only basis, so that payment is only made on a sale. These folks are traditionally known as “affiliates;” hence the name.

Affiliate marketing could be quite lucrative, and in theory can produce residual income, money that’s earned from work already done. Think of all those songs on the radio.

Did you know that each time one of them is played, the musicians involved are paid? They may have first composed and performed the piece years, even decades, ago, but these days they’re still being paid for it, each and every single time the song comes on the air (or is used in movies, et cetera).

That is residual income, and that’s the true power of affiliate marketing. It’s a promise that animates tens of thousands of affiliate marketers every year, recruiting ever more affiliates – for the way to residual incomes lies in creating one’s own network of affiliates who “kick up” a percentage of their earnings to oneself.

Of course, the devil is in the details, as the old adage goes, and before signing up it is important to carefully educate oneself. Most programs need an initial purchase of some sort, and many others require that sales be on-going in order to continue receiving affiliate income. So let’s say that Charlie has built a network of subscribers to some kind of service or other.

Each time they renew, he receives his take, his cut. But some programs will stipulate that he only actually receives his “lifetime” commission on the condition that he continues to generate new customers! Otherwise, his earnings on his established customers are held for him, and not usually in some third-party escrow, either.

Coming from a country whose cuisines are very unique and usually mysterious to western audiences, Tempura is really a surprisingly western style dish for Japanese food, though not without its distinctive charms. Tempura is simply any of a variety of seafoods – fish, shellfish, and cephalopods – and vegetables that have been doused in tempura batter and deep fried. Tempura batte itself is really a simple affair, made up mostly of cold water and soft wheat flower.

Sometimes starch, eggs, baking soda or powder, oils, or spices may also be added to alter the texture, consistency, and taste of the batter. It is then typically whisked for a brief period of time, perhaps only a few seconds – just enough to mix the ingredients – with a small instrument, normally chop sticks. Contrary to other, typically a lot more viscous batters used in deep frying, tempura batter is intentionally allowed to maintain a lumpy consistency. Between this and the consistently cold temperature of the batter, the end result is that tempura batter is normally fluffier.

Otherwise, too high a temperature or too vigorous whisking will release gluten from the wheat flour which will give the batter a tougher, doughier consistency that is undesirable. Special flour is also available for the making of tempura batter that will not release gluten under these circumstances, essentially making the batter failure proof.

After tempura batter has been prepared, small, thin strips of vegetables and seafoods are dipped in the matter and fried for a short period. Usual seafoods are shrimp, scallops, squid, crab, and a number of fishes, which are also fried along with vegetables like peppers, potatoes, mushrooms, and different species of squashes.

Canola or vegetable oil are both sufficient for frying, but traditional preparation demands that the ingredients dipped in tempura batter be fried in either sesame seed or tea seed oil. This should impart a much more authentic flavor, and purists suggest that use of these oils results in a lighter, fluffier, crispier tempura batter after it’s been fried. Also in contrast to American cuisine, great care is taken not to overcook the battered ingredients, lest their flavor be polluted. Measures are also taken to assure that lumps of tempura batter do not remain floating in the oil after ingredients have been fried.

This is to prevent the batter from becoming overfried in the oil and burning, leaving a bad taste in the oil that can in turn ruin ingredients yet to be fried. These lumps of tempura batter even have their own name, Tenkasu, and are themselves used as ingredients or as toppings in other dishes. Tempura is usually eaten almost immediately right after frying. There are a variety of sauces that are traditionally utilized, where pieces are dipped using chop sticks. Other additives like sea salt and powdered green tea leaves are also common.

Modern technology makes webinars a terrific way to earn some money on the internet. Are you an expert in something? Do you love public speaking? Then hosting your own webinar, or web-based seminar, would be an ideal way to make money, potentially quite serious money – on account of the reach and scope of the worldwide web. Too fanciful? Tell that to serial entrepreneur Zalman Silber, whose simple idea of putting a little moviehouse at the Empire State Building has exploded exponentially into a string of businesses.

It’s all so simple – and simplistic, to be honest, that it almost smells of a rip-off, a tourist trap. For the New York Skyride, the cornerstone of his success (a star salesman already at famed New York Life Insurance Company, it was the Skyride that truly made him his first million), is nothing more than a half-hour “educational film” of the kind that children have to sit through in school, a movie about the history of the Empire State Building and some other famous New York City landmarks. That’s all. No “ride” at all involved, unless it’s to be taken for one where money is concerned! Yet it’s a perfectly legitimate, legal business, and it’s been operating for well over ten years now, so obviously somebody – a great many somebodies – are satisfied enough. And in all fairness it must be said that such success has since allowed Zalman Silber to offer much better tourist attractions, albeit in Australia, in the form of the Sydney Skywalk and The Edge in Melbourne.

But anyway, all that’s simply to say that regardless of how ridiculous the idea may appear at first, it’s difficult to say for sure whether it has “legs,” whether it will “run” or “hunt.” And a webinar is really inexpensive, relatively speaking, even if you do decide on pseudo-professional production values (for which there are a number of quite powerful software packages available, even for free, that should be able to help).

With only a minimum of monetary investment, you could start your own web-based seminar business on a topic that you’re an expert in. Come on, everybody’s good at something! Okay, maybe you’re no master craftsman, but the great majority of webinars or webcasts involve a basic to intermediate-level knowledge, anyway. Real master craftsmen (or master chefs or master carpenters or fitness trainers or weavers or what-have-you) are unlikely to tune into something on the web in order to increase their expertise in any case. Your likely audience would be beginners, whether complete beginners or beginners with some experience behind them who are ready to move onto an intermediate level of knowledge.

The most important thing in general, though, is SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. It’s the second decade of the 21st Century, after all, and you can be sure that all the experts are available already, online with their own sites and webinars established. It’s going to take some considerable SEO for people to be able to find you in the first place!

There are few cultural cuisines quite so paradoxical as sushi. On paper, sushi sounds as an utterly abominable premise to western sensibilities: vinegared rice, rolled up inside a wrapping of nori (seaweed), and comprised largely of raw fish and seafood? And yet sushi is a wildly popular dish in the United States. Japanese sushi restaurants could be discovered even in small rural towns, and are everywhere in larger cities. One can even find sushi in most regular supermarkets.

Sushi is available in a wide variety of styles and presentations, depending on their ingredients as well as the method of their preparation, but when most Americans think Sushi, they typically picture makizushi, literally meaning “rolled sushi”. Generally, makizushi is rolled in nori, which is the Japanese name for any of a variety of red alga seaweed species. Given that nori is the key element behind the “rolled” (maki) portion of makizushi, its preparation is essential to the outcome of the entire dish.

From the initial seeding process, through harvest and the final preparation of nori, every step is intensely monitored and managed through a system that has been perfected and well understood for centuries. There are actually over 230 square miles of Japanese coastal waters devoted to the farming of nori, from which around 350,000 tons are harvested a year bringing in roughly two billion US dollars in revenue.

Nori is grown underneath the water hanging from nets that drift upon the water’s surface, where they go on to grow for a period of about 45 days before harvest. After harvested, nori is generally processed by mechanical means designed to imitate the traditional Japanese practices that have been perfected over hundreds if not thousands of years.

These practices aren’t unlike producing paper, and the final result is a dried, paper-thin sheet of nori about 8 inches by 7 inches. Similar to fine wine, the production of nori can be modified to produce a wide range of grades of differing quality and expense. The cheapest varieties, generally produced in Chinese coastal waters, can go for as low as six American cents per sheet. On the opposite end of that scale, nori available only in Japan can go for as much as fifty US dollars per sheet.

A sheet or nori is then generally used to make a single roll of makizushi by actually rolling up the ingredients inside of it to make a tube-like item, which is then sliced up several times to produce the common western image of sushi. There are numerous types of sushi, each differentiated by the number and types of ingredients enclosed in the roll. Nori is also utilized in types of sushi which are not rolled in the typical cylindrical manner, for example Temaki which is a cone shaped configuration of nori that is literally stuffed full of its ingredients, looking something like an ice cream cone.

Green energy is forecasted to be the great industry with the 21st Century, paying great dividends to the country or countries that pioneer and successfully capitalize on it. Economically, environmentally, and even militarily, the capability to produce sustainable forms of energy is really a prize that will set the fate of the world for centuries to come.

Unfortunately, the United States is in danger of losing the green energy race. Our country is addicted to oil and the politicians are addicted to corporate money, so change has been virtually impossible.

On the other side of the world, literally, are the leaders of China, who have embarked on an ambitious plan to produce solar panels as well as implement solar farms themselves for domestic use. The Chinese are also big on wind farms and nuclear power, other technologies which Americans first developed but have now abandoned.

Sounds ominous? The chattering classes are all up in arms about the issue, but nothing has been getting done, not even with the election of Barack Obama. The interests are just too entrenched. Everybody stands to lose something, and contemporary American culture seems to have lost sight of any notion of the common good.

It’s a crazy situation. You can find American citizens, engineers and scientists, educated with American tax dollars, who now conduct their work in China or are employed by firms that do the rest of their work there. In effect, United States tax dollars are educating the individuals whose work will ultimately benefit the Chinese!

Of course, these scientists and engineers are only working for the highest salaries. But the companies they work for – American firms, owned by American citizens – complain that they simply cannot do business here; they need to go where the action is, and that’s China. To do anything else would be like trying to sell ice at the North Pole.

Mention marble sculpture and chances are that and most folks think about such examples as Michelangelo’s David or Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa. But there is much more to marble artwork than that. Obviously, no one denies that Italian marble statues are some of the best examples of the material ever made, but there’s a lot more to working with the “crystalline rock” (its etymology via the ancient Greeks, masters of the material themselves) than what is commonly imagined.

Modern examples abound, in which marble is pushed to the limits. But for some people, the most majestic examples of marble sculpture are those Mother Nature herself has so lovingly crafted over untold eons of patient chiseling and polishing.

For who has not caught his or her breath on the startling simplicity of stalacites and stalagmites? Arising out from the coolness of the dark, or silently suspended off the cavern ceiling, these unmetamorphosed limestone might indeed be what first inspired humankind to chisel and polish.

Or consider such folded and weathered examples as stud the shorelines of lakes, rivers, and oceans. Why do folks not usually consider such works in contemplations of marble? Nature is certainly full of beauty, had we but eyes to see.

Of course, human creations are maybe infinitely more versatile, whereas even essentially the most astounding of natural wonders can only come about as the result of the same eternal forces which, after several hundred millennia, prove to be of a limited repertoire.

But the point is clear; marble has been worked on by much more than just man, and, for that matter, a lot more than Greeks and Romans and Italians! Marble is discovered not only in statue form, but some of its greatest achievements has been as buildings, for instance, the incredible Taj Mahal in Agra, India. Next ye think of marble, then, think of every thing!

You might believe that the proliferation of coffee houses the past twenty to thirty years would mean a decrease in the sale of coffee machines, but on the contrary they remain as popular as ever, with espresso makers one of the most ballyhooed products on late-night television. It’s a interesting thing, and might not exactly make a lot of sense on the face of it, but in fact the number of businesses committed to serving coffee has only made people want to buy coffee machines of their own!

Now why should this be? The solution points up to an intriguing feature of human nature. But first think about why people should patronize coffee houses: it isn’t all about the coffee. Many restaurants, such as Starbucks, have hit upon the effective formula that formerly saw the rise of sidewalk cafes throughout Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: people wanted a nice place indoors! Avoiding cramped quarters at home, such establishments provided a relatively deluxe environment for the price of a cup of coffee. And it’s the same today, with students among the most faithful of customers for these chain coffee houses.

But why should people desire coffee machines, then? Well, in this case, it also isn’t essentially all about the coffee. That’s right! You’d feel that people who like coffee either go to coffee houses or buy coffee makers to use at home. But in both cases, it isn’t always about the coffee itself, but everything else relating to how they get their coffee!

In the case of a coffee house, people go for the ambience as much as anything else. In the case of a home coffee maker, it’s about the convenience: no lines to wait on, but everything on a timer and ready when you wake up or come home, with the same range of flavors – all at a much reduced cost. And there’s always seating available!