2012 PREDICTIONS AND THE WEB BOT:A Rant

I was watching the History Channel tonight. They started out talking about 2012, the Mayan calendar, and the Hopi Indian prophecy that the end of the 4th World was coming with storms, earthquakes, and *gasp!* global warming, and then there would be the beginning of the 5th World. The program mentioned the Sibyl (or Sybil), Oracle of Cumae, and the Priestess at Delphi, who may have hallucinated because of the ethylene gas rising through cracks in the cave floors where they went into their trances.
Also mentioned was Merlin (Welsh Myrrden) of legendary King Arthur’s time, and the Revelation of St. John in The Bible, the I Ching, and some others that I have forgotten. Funny thing is, the History Channel seems to have taken their material straight off a blog called “2012 Predictions.” http://2012-predictions-review.blogspot.com/2008/01/filled-with-breath-of-apollo.html
Where it starts to get creepy is when they say the Hopi prophesy mentions the world being covered by a spider web in the 20th and 21st century. It is easy to relate this to the Internet–the World Wide Web. Further creepiness comes from something called the Web Bot, originally created as an investment tool, with robotic agents called “spiders” crawling over all the sites on the Web and collecting data on what is being reported, talked about, written about, and what is selling. After this, they moved from marketing and economic trends to predicting natural disasters, and then they wanted to see if they could use the Web Bot as a predictive tool by gaining access to the “collective consciousness of the world!”
Does anyone see how DANGEROUS a thing like the Web Bot can be? Not only can those running it plug into the collective UNconscious of the entire human population–at least those who interact with the Internet–but they can MANIPULATE it. They could make people believe what they want them to believe by loading (as in loaded dice) the Internet with bogus or slanted news, opinions, rants, popularity polls, allegations, and outright lies containing keywords easily found by the major search engines (and listed first on the page).
The worst thing about this is that much of what is already being said on the Web is not necessarily TRUE or ACCURATE, or COMPLETE, but only what people think, believe, feel, fear, admire, or resent. This is how the power structure already works, and how the minds of easily-led adults–AND ESPECIALLY OF CHILDREN–can be turned in whatever direction the manipulators want them to go, and mostly by scaring them. (Although, the media and the public school system is already doing a pretty good job of that!)
Are you ready to have your chip implanted?

Or can you get off the train when you think you’re being railroaded?

 

Susan Boyle: Her Voice and the Dream She Dreamed

Even if you don’t watch “Britain’s Got Talent” on TV, if you’ve had a news channel on in the past week, you have heard of the newest singing talent phenomenon, Susan Boyle, and have seen at least a portion of her YouTube video from her Week 1 performance. If it didn’t bring tears of joy overflowing from your heart, then you have no heart, friend!
She seems to have appeared out of nowhere, but according to some accounts, she is well-known for singing in church and on Karaoke circuits in her native Scotland. She has had her own Channel on YouTube.com since 2007, created and maintained by her nephew, since she has said she does not have a computer–although it’s possible that she has one now! Wherever she gets access to the Internet, she does make occasional replies to the thousands of comments posted on pages showing videos about her.
A 47-year-old woman living in Blackburn, West Lothian, Scotland, Susan is said to have taken care of her widowed “mum” until her death 2 years ago. But now, with her appearance on BGT, she will certainly get a recording contract, and we will be hearing much more from her. Good for her! She deserves it!
She has also pumped new life into the song, “I Dreamed a Dream”, written in 1980 by Claude-Michel Schönberg, with lyrics by Alain Boubil, Jean-Marc Natel, and Herbert Kretzmer. Still protected by International copyright, the purchased downloads of digital sheet music from online giant, Musicnotes.com, has surpassed downloads of “The Climb” from the recent Hannah Montana movie.
I must admit that when a friend asked me to help him find the lyrics and a soundtrack with which he could sing the song, I was swept up, myself. I had not seen the performance on TV, and had fallen asleep waiting for news video of it to come up on the news channel I was watching. But it didn’t take long to find it on http://www.youtube.com/SusanBoyle.

Recent interview at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqZmcg0xEUU.

After listening to the song in every online version I could find, and copying the lyrics, I realized that “I Dreamed a Dream” is too complex to learn properly–and remember it–by that method. So I sprang for $4.95USD at www.musicnotes.com and printed out 6 pages of sheet music.
I can’t sing like Susan Boyle. But in the privacy of my home, I can dream a dream, and feel the joy of singing a beautiful song.
Go get ‘em, Susan Boyle! I’m in your corner!

 

GROW IT OR MOW IT!–a little rant about stubble

There is a trend among men between 18 and 30-something to sport a 3-to-

Eric McCormack

5-day growth of stubble on their faces. They apparently believe that this is proof of a hefty amount of testosterone being produced by adequately-sized “nads.” I really don’t know to whom they think this look is attractive. What woman wants to have her face scraped by this wiry growth? To me, a woman of 70, who frankly likes beards, a man with stubble on his face and ‘fashionably’ tousled hair, looks like he has just come off a weekend drunk, or has spent a week camping and got lost. Perhaps he wants to look like he was held hostage by terrorists? All he needs is food in his teeth and redolent B.O. to complete this disguise.

Hugh Laurie

I like “House”, but I wish he’d lose the brush! Stubble does not make a man look tough or heroic. In fact, most career military types are quite disciplined about the neat appearance of their hair and their personal hygiene. Actors who have boyish good looks into their 40’s, might start shaving with a hair-trimmer so that they can be considered for serious character roles or action movies, and for some, it works. But once they pass 40, as Brad Pitt has, the stubble makes them look tired and grubby, and they often look better in a moustache and well-trimmed beard.

Pitt & son-shabby retro chic

Pitt in goatee

Now, George Clooney, Noah Wyle, and Anthony Edwards could be excused for having a 5 o’clock (a.m.) shadow if they have been on duty in the ER for two days without rest. But Clooney, now nearing 50, can grow a luxuriant beard that any man would be proud of.

Clooney as Dr. Ross

 

Clooney with beard

Dick Van Dyke and Donald Sutherland have worn beautiful white moustache & beard combos when they hit their 70’s. But now the cycle completes as you see the elder statesmen of the stage and screen shave their faces clean, so that they can look more youthful!

Andy Griffith (Matlock)

 

Redford 2005

 

Donald Sutherland 2005

Ronald Reagan

I visited a site that has for 10 years been devoted to everything a man (or woman) needs to know about growing, styling, and caring for a beard. Here is a link to the page on growing one: http://www.beards.org/grow.php

 

TOO OLD TO TEXT

You know your 2-year contract is almost up when your cellphone provider sends you an offer for the latest fabulous phone with all the features “everyone” wants now. All you have to do to get it mailed to you free is add another line of service and commit to another 2-year contract.

Motorola Qwerty

While most kids and young adults can easily ‘text’ with a standard keypad, it’s OK if you can’t. They have phones with typewriter (QWERTY) keypads. You don’t want to carry around a calculator or appointment calendar? That’s cool–your phone can do that. You want to check your email or do your banking without lugging a laptop around? Your phone can do that, too. And of course, you can snap photos with the camera feature and send them to people. You don’t even have to wear a watch anymore.

On some phones, you can download music and short videos, and set your DVR at home. But who would want to do all that, and spend the money it takes to have access to all those features? Not me, certainly! However, I know one busy, tech-savvy career woman who travels a lot, and I have seen her gleefully shake her iPhone to come up with a map to a random restaurant location when I was with her in an unfamiliar city.

iPhone 3G

I don’t text. I have enough difficulty finding the numbers on the keypad, and it costs enough just to maintain phone service. I have trouble setting the time on my 4-button digital watch, though most men of any age can experiment with it for a few seconds and figure it out. And of course, a boy or girl of 8 or 10 would have no problem with it.

 

MODERN DENTISTRY

holey molars

My parents, if they were alive today,  would be amazed and proud to know that I still have more than half of my natural teeth. I am rather amazed, myself, since  by the time I had reached my mid-thirties, most of my teeth had fillings, and several had been thought beyond repair, and so had been extracted. Consequently, before I was 40 years old, I was fitted with my first partial plate. It cost $250. I could not afford to get a lower partial, and so it was several years before I had a complete set.
Now, those same partial plates costs $1400 each. But after 25 years, I am having my old ones replaced tomorrow.
My parents were 26 and 28 years old when I was born. Both of them already had complete dentures! That was 1938; they had very little money, and that may have been the least expensive way to address the problem of teeth that needed continual work and probably caused them a lot of pain. 
Those dentures lasted them the rest of their lives. Every night they soaked the plates, and every morning they patiently applied the paste liner that kept them fitting well enough that they could eat, talk, and sing without any problems that I knew of. I do recall that they occasionally filed off pressure points that began to bother them, though. I have no idea what they paid for them, but they were excellent dentures. My mother kept my father’s when he passed away in 1982; she was buried  wearing hers.

I fully expected to be wearing dentures  when I reached retirement age. Instead, I have 4 teeth that have never needed restoring,  8 teeth with fillings, 8 crowns, and one root canal. I can’t say I have ever enjoyed sitting in a dentist’s chair or paying thousands of dollars to keep as many natural teeth as I could. It is always a time of high tension when I have any work done–even routine cleaning. But with modern anesthesia and high-speed water-cooled drills, my dentist provides care that is as painless as possible.
Perhaps there will come a time when, as I saw in a popular science fiction series, people can have their teeth sealed against decay for decades, and when they do need to have a cavity repaired, all it takes is a brief touch with a chemical. Our methods will probably seem barbaric then.

 

Nobody Asked the Kids

Dad Kills Wife, Kids Before Turning Gun On Himself
AP LOS ANGELES – A man who fatally shot his wife, five young children and himself Tuesday had earlier faxed a note to a TV station claiming the couple had just been fired from their hospital jobs and together planned the killings as a final escape for the whole family. “Why leave the children to a stranger?” Ervin Lupoe wrote, according to KABC-TV.

How can anyone who claims to love his/her children believe that they would be better off dead than “left with strangers?” Do they think they will see them again in “heaven?” Not likely, after committing this totally selfish act! Whatever face these people put on such murder-suicide atrocities, the fate of being raised among “strangers” could not be worse than never getting the chance to live at all. There are plenty of people who were orphaned at a young age, but took the opportunities and challenges of life and made something of themselves.

Life is precious, especially to a child who has hardly lived! I could understand choosing to kill oneself and his family if all of them were facing a slow and painful death by radiation poisoning, or something else from which there was no hope of escaping. But murder-suicide as the solution to this temporary situation, which could have been worked through, cannot be justified. If life means having everything go smoothly, with no problems, no changes, no adjustments to make–if it means never having to pick oneself up and try again–then death is the easy way out.

But they didn’t ask the children, who soon could have been among new friends and family, and could have had the chance to grow up.

 

Hey, I didn’t fall off the planet…

Just to let folks know, I’m still here. I just haven’t had any brilliant insights for a while. As for my stationary bike-riding, it’s pretty much hit or miss right now, since life has gotten rather “busy” lately. I promise that I will be back, as soon as something strikes me as being important–or at least interesting.

 

WHAT THE HECK IS BLU-RAY? (Yikes! VHS is Dead!)

Of course, I know that “Blu-ray” is some kind of video format, and that there is such a thing as a Blu-ray player, but it is not clear in my 70-year-old mind whether this player plays a disk that resembles a DVD, or what? Whatever it is, I am sure that it’s too expensive for me, and I’m perfectly satisfied with the quality I get with my plain DVDs (which are not even HD.)
I’ll admit that the DVD is better in almost every way than the VHS cassette. The way in which it is not better is that most people, including me, can’t afford a stand-alone DVD recorder. Nor can they afford to subscribe to a service like Tivo. Anyway, digital recording, so that you can watch any program you want at a more convenient time, is totally beyond my poor low-tech brain’s ability to grasp.

I kinda “get” that the digital recorder is always “on”, but how you find the program you want to watch when you finally have the time, and how you can pause the playing of a live show while you go to the fridge, and then start watching again where you left off , is too complicated for me. I would never learn to use it if I had it!!

The thing is, I still have a VCR, and that’s what I use to record a show that I can’t watch because I have to be away from home, or because I want to watch another show that comes on at the same time. But I just read that they have stopped selling [new] VHS tapes in the stores. And this makes me think that I won’t be able to buy blank VHS tapes, either, pretty soon. I know how to use the VCR, and if it’s not too long between times that I want to timer-record, I can even manage that without forgetting how to set it correctly.

For the DVDs that I buy or receive as gifts, I have a very good CD/DVD player, without Blu-ray, whatever that is. I can even play my CDs and DVDs on the computer, but I’d rather use the big TV screen and stereo sound instead of wearing out my computer.

But what will I do when I have worn out my blank VHS tapes and can’t buy any more? Do I have to go out and buy up a couple of dozen now while I can still find them?

 

VIDEO: Living with Wolves

This little abandoned wolf and his siblings were raised by a human, but not to be socialized with people. Watch him learn how to howl!

Living with wolves

Posted using ShareThis

 

The Dark Side

The other night Cinemax showed a movie entitled “Queen of the Damned.” The TV Guide blurb described the film this way: “In this thriller based on Anne Rice’s novel, the vampire Lestat…is a rock star conspiring with the Queen of the Vampires (Aaliyah) for world domination…” Why do people apparently enjoy this *crap*?

I have an intelligent, well-educated friend who has become a devoted follower of the HBO series, “True Blood,” another show about vampires that attempts to portray vampires in a most sympathetic way. They want to become mainstream citizens, and to do this, they no longer consume human blood, but survive on synthetic blood so that they don’t have to bite humans. (Is this kind of like becoming vegetarians?) There are a couple of things wrong here. First, there is no such thing as a vampire. It is a literary invention. And second, if there were such a thing as a vampire, why on earth would anyone want to associate with him/her and learn to *understand* him/her ? Forbidden fruit?

OK, so I am missing the point here, I guess? Everyone knows that vampires are not real, no more than hobbits, 900-year-old Jedi masters, or Vulcans with copper-based blood, who have been trained since birth never to  do anything illogical. But hobbits, Jedis, and Vulcans are the good guys, and it’s OK to believe in them. A vampire shuns the sunlight, sleeps in a coffin all day, and comes out at night to bite people on the neck and suck the life’s blood out of them! His/her canine teeth can suddenly grow into fangs, and then just as suddenly shrink back again. He/she is hypnotically attractive and supernaturally strong so that humans fall helplessly under his/her power…and then the most “exciting” thing happens: the helpless, infatuated human gets bitten, losing so much blood that he/she turns pale, and then turns into a vampire, too! (How this occurs is never explained–evil magic, I guess.) A vampire, of course, can only be killed by a stake made of aspen wood, driven through the heart. But no one really believes this, do they?

Most of us, if we receive any upbringing at all, are taught that witches, vampires, wizards and the like are evil, and are in league with the devil. In children’s stories, these evil creatures always meet a horrible death at the hands of the hero. Why then, do many children grow up into teenagers and adults who love scary movies, Stephen King novels, and “scary” *reality* shows on TV? Even worse, they are attracted to drugs that have the power to enslave them. We see more and more of this kind of “entertainment”–drugs, violent crime, and horror–since, apparently, this stuff of nightmares is what people will pay to see, and the more realistic and gory, the better.

Where does that come from, I wonder? I know I risk offending some people who are fans of certain writers because they are so skilled at making their fantasies seem real. If it is the writing they admire, I guess I can understand that. But if it is because they get off on being drawn into a nightmare, then no, I don’t get it.