Google

Have you seen you can make a personalized home page on Google now? It works brilliantly, for me better than RSS feeds (I never check those).
One of the things it showed me was this article:
Who's Afraid of Google? Everyone.
As soon as somebody gains power, the knee-jerk reaction of a big percentage of mankind is always fear.
As indicated by hundreds of things, google.org amongst them, Google is a huge force for good on this planet. So it threatens some business interests, deal with it.
I'd like to publicly say Thank You to Sergey Brin and Larry Page for doing the brilliant work they are.

More motti

By popular request, more examples of my motti.

Don't let others steal your time.

Appreciate yourself as well as you do your best friends.

In the end, your only judges are yourself and the Universe.

Conflict is almost always a waste of time and energy.

Your belief in yourself, your desires, and your perceptions is of paramount importance.

New eBay scam

This is the first time I have fallen for an email scam!
I got a mail informing me that I had an "unpaid item dispute" on eBay. I logged on via the link in the email, and my login failed. So I changed it. Then it turned out there was no dispute at all. So I got suspicious and checked the source code of the email. Quite so: the links in the email did not lead to eBay.com at all, but to a different site! So maybe they now have my login to eBay, I don't know. (I logged in on the right site and changed it again.) But something strange is going on.
Because this mail did not ask for me to enter any information, I did not follow my own rule: Always look at the source code of a mail which talks about your account on eBay, Amazon, or Paypal. You can see where the links really lead.
Or else, don't log into a web site from a link in a mail, do it from their home page.

Book

I warmly recommend the book Shortcut To A Miracle.
Maybe I'll write an article about Mind over Matter.

Motti

I am becoming more relaxed in life. It's great.
"Let's see how it goes" is the newest of my motti.

"Motti" of course is plural of "motto". It just seems obvious to me. Feel free to use it. :)

Ugress

How about some excellent music? For free?
Go here:
Ugress.com
I particularly recommend the song "Decepticons". It is one of my favorite songs ever.

About enemies

You have exactly the enemies you think you need.
Eolake Stobblehouse

There is a very good interview with U2's Bono in November's Rolling Stone. He says: "Your enemies define you, so make them interesting." I say: No! No, no, no. If you do that you'll fall in love with them, and you'll never get rid of them.
Who needs enemies? Enemies are only good for two things: 1) making your life interesting if you don't have the imagination to do so yourself. 2) Stopping you in the areas where you believe you need stopping.
And in the end, all that is really boring. It is like saying you "need" to be ill or to wear a ball and chain. Don't you have stuff to do?

You have exactly the enemies you think you need.
Eolake Stobblehouse

Just Don't, a story

I was just reminded of my old short-short story Just Don't, which was published in the prestigeous anthology L Ron Hubbard presents Writers of the Future, vol V.
Most of you probably don't know it, so I "reprint" it herewith.
You can find more stories, art, etc on my site.

JUST DON'T
By Eolake Stobblehouse

One fine day on Planet Earth, I was sitting in my own comfortable home in my own comfortable chair in my own comfortable body. And just as I had leisurely turned a page in my book, and was about to leisurely take a sip of my coffee, the doorbell rang.

I raised my body, squinting at the sunshine outside, and went to the door.

Having opened it, I found myself looking at a spaceman. I knew immediately that he was a spaceman from his different looks and his suit.

Now, I was quite dumbfounded. I had a funny feeling in my stomach, and didn't know what to make of the situation. But this spaceman seemed quite as cheerful as any sergeant handling civilians.

He looked up from his clipboard, said, "Follow me, please," and turned around.

I hesitated, looking back into my comfortable home, and then stumbled after him. "Hey," I asked. "What gives? What's happening?"

"Oh," he said, "they are going to give you guys another treatment. Some of you are regaining your memories."

"What memories!?"

"Don't think about it," he said.

The end

A $35,000 digicam

So you think the Nikon D2x is a fantastic camera? (It is, I have one.) Take a gander at a $35,000 digital camera!
This is the most amazing, beautiful, and impractical thing I have heard of.
So it's either this or the Mercedes for Christmas. Hm, decisions, decisions.

Crop Circles

We don't know much about crop circles. In the early nineties it was "exposed" (oddly enough in all the major newspapers on the same day...) that they were frauds, merely man-made. But that exposure has since been exposed itself, the people who supposedly made the formations could not explain how they did it, or indeed replicate it.
And since then, "crop circles" have grown wildly beyond mere circles and become amazingly complex and huge mathematical works of art appearing mysteriously in crops around the world, though mostly in England.

They are often hundreds of feet across, and contains hundreds of elements, precisely aligned after complex mathematics. And they appear usually in one short summer night. They have no footprints in them. And they often have strange magnetic phenomena within the formation.

Me, I don't know who makes them. Aliens? Spirits? Humans with secret technology? In any case they are really beautiful and compelling, and a strong witness that there is more under the heavens than we know.

Steve Alexander (Temporary Temples) is perhaps the best photographer of this phenomenon. He publishes a beautiful booklet every year with pictures of the circles. The books are really high quality, warmly recommended.
Steve does not normally give out high-rez versions of his pictures, but with my legendary charm and a promise of a link on this blog, I talked him into letting me share a few with you. They are big files, but worth the download. Enjoy.

Crop Circle Silbury Hill 2005
Crop Circle West Kennet 2004
Crop Circle West Kennet 2004 B
Crop Circle Windmill Hill 2004

Education

A reader has challenged me to write about education. I said I was not the most obvious person to do so, since I don't have any!
At least not a formal one. I didn't finish 12th grade, and I have never seen the inside of a university. (Do they really have all that mahogany?)
Yet I have an excellent life, financially and spiritually.

I won't say formal education is worthless. It is very valuable for a traditional life and craft. For learning how to be a dentist or an engineer, you won't get around it, so far as I know.

At the same time it is a fact that a very high percentage of the very most successful people in the world did not get a formal education. This is because to be successful takes education, but the kind of spirit and persistence it takes to be uniquely successful is not something anybody can teach you. At least not somebody who works in the education system. The same goes for achieving original and groundbreaking ideas and executing them. As a matter of fact, if there is a big downside to formal education, it is that it tends to kill originality by its very nature. (It can only teach you how others are doing things.)

I think I can say one thing for sure: your most important education is the one you give yourself.
You should be reading at least three books at once at any time: one on how to improve your craft. One on a craft or area you would like to go into. And one which talks about your relationship with the universe and beyond.

Wallace and Gromit

Since the advent of video and DVDs, I don't go to the movies often. (For one thing I like to be able to take breaks.) But I went with a friend last night to see Wallace and Gromit: The Curse Of The Wererabbit.
I warmly recommend it. It has even better production values than Chicken Run, and to my taste it is even more entertaining and has more soul. In fact, it is the first animated movie outside Pixar I would put in the same class as Toy Story II and The Incredibles. It is just hilarious.
It has it all: suspence, humor, mystery, action, and even romance (in a big-hair, big-toothed sort of British way).
Stobblehouse sez: Way Cool.