Muhammad Ali Highlight

In his prime, he was a thing of beauty.

Success With Ease

Introduction to Success With Ease:

"I’m lazy. I admit it. For years, it was one of the things that kept me from succeeding in life — after all, you’ve got to work really hard to succeed, right? That’s certainly what I was told, and certainly what I believed.

We call it a work ethic: It’s good to work, right? It’s good for the soul. It builds character. And hard work creates success. But I had a problem with that, if I was really honest with myself, because I didn’t want to work all that hard.

Given the choice between a day when I have to set the alarm clock and get up early and shower and shave and go to work and a day when I can laze in bed for as long as I want and then do whatever I feel like, I’ll take that second option every time.

I’ve never been a “morning person.” It takes me three or four hours to get going, and some days, to be really honest, I never get going at all. Some days I do very little. I’ve always been that way, since childhood.

“But look at the books you’ve written,” people have said to me. “And the music you’ve recorded. And you run a publishing company. You can’t be lazy and do all that.”

Oh yes you can, I say. All it takes to write a book (or record music, or run a publishing company) is persistence.

You can be lazy and still be persistent — and once you learn how to do that, you can accomplish a great deal.

...maybe it’s my one unique contribution to the world — but I have to add this:

You can succeed in an easy and relaxed manner.

You don’t have to be a Type A workaholic to succeed.

Success With Ease

http://www.successwithease.net/FreeChapter/index.php?e=154&t=web3_view

If I can go from poverty to gratifying success, so can you. I don’t have any special tools that you don’t have.

We all have all the tools we need to succeed in life. It’s just a matter of focusing our creative minds in the right direction.

I knew how important it was to do what I loved.

I knew that in some way, if I went for my dreams, it would all work out somehow.

I asked myself a question I had rarely asked before. A simple and important question: What do I want to do with the rest of my life?

A single simple phrase can turn your thinking around, and change the course of your thoughts and the course of your life.

This is the visionary phrase that changed my thinking and my life: Within every adversity are equal or greater benefits. Within every problem is an opportunity.
Even in the knocks of life we can find great gifts. Opportunities are everywhere."

"George Bush Don't Like Black People"

This new clip by subMedia (http://submediatv.com) is an effort to keep the mantra going "George Bush Don't Like Black People" by The Legendary K.O.

A synchronicity is a meaningful coincidence.

Rigorous Intuition: What Dreams May Come:

"We likely know by our experience of them that synchronicities don't pertain only to borderland experiences. However, they do all lead us to borderland issues of human consciousness.

In 1906 Carl Jung found a young patient diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic staring out of his ward window at the sun, moving his head from side to side. Jung asked him what he was doing, and the man explained he was watching the sun's penis, and moving his head it moved as well, and caused the wind to blow. Several years later, as Michael Talbot recounts in The Holographic Universe, Jung read a translation of an ancient Persian religious text that consisted of a 'series of rituals and invocations designed to bring on visions':

It described one of the visions and said that if the participant looked at the sun he would see a tube hanging down from it, and when the tube moved from side to side it would cause the wind to blow. Since circumstances made it extremely unlikely that the man had contact with the text containing the ritual, Jung concluded that the man's vision was not simply a product of his unconscious mind, but had bubbled up from a deeper level, from the collective unconscious of the human race itself."

"You can't keep up." - Feels like I'm drowning in new information all the time.

Creating Passionate Users: The myth of "keeping up":

"You can't keep up. There is no way. And trying to keep up will probably just make you dumber.You can never be current on everything you think you should be...

Why do we pressure ourselves? Why do we constantly feel like we're struggling to keep up, yet never succeeding?

...So... it's time to let that go. You're not keeping up. I'm not keeping up. And neither is anyone else. At least not in everything...

Besides letting go, what else can we do to combat Information Anxiety? I have just a few tips, but I'm hoping you'll add more:

Find the best aggregators

Get summaries

Cut the redundancy!

Unsubscribe to as many things as possible

Recognize that gossip and celebrity entertainment are black holes [Hi Sandy! - Rob]
It's like watching a car accident despite our best intentions... we just can't help look, so the more you can stay away from the publications that document every personal detail of every music and film star the better. Let that be your guilty pleasure for when you're at the dentist's office...

Pick the categories you want for a balanced perspective, and include some from OUTSIDE your main field of interest

Be a LOT more realistic about what you're likely to get to, and throw the rest out.
Don't file it. Don't store it. What you don't have piling up you can't feel guilty about.

...In the meantime, take a deep breath and repeat after me, "I will never keep up. Keeping up is a myth." And if it makes you feel any better, add, "John isn't keeping up either."

Once we let go of trying to be more-current-than-thou, we can spend more time on things that really matter. "

The only Bible I can get behind - "This liberation from belief systems is precisely what the Bible is about."

:: Douglas Rushkoff - Weblog :::

"Okay, so let's get into this God game.

I think it's time to get serious about the role God plays in human affairs, and evaluate whether it's appropriate to let everyone in on the bad news: God doesn't exist, never did, and the closest thing we'll ever see to God will emerge from our own collective efforts at making meaning.

Maybe I'm just getting old, but I no longer see the real value in being tolerant of other people's beliefs. Sure, when beliefs are relegated to the realm of pure entertainment, they pose no real danger...

When religions are practiced, as they are by a majority of those in developed nations, today, as a kind of nostalgic little ritual - a community event or an excuse to get together and not work - it doesn't really screw anything up too badly. But when they radically alter our ability to contend with reality, cope with difference, or implement the most basic ethical provisions, they must be stopped...

Add to that the more reliable polls finding that 35% of Americans say they are "born again" - a particularly modern phenomenon that came only after the charlatan rabble-rousers during the Great Depression - and you get a picture of a nation hoodwinked into a passive, childlike, yet dogmatic relationship to the myths that were originally written to sustain them, spur their motivation to social justice, and encourage continuing evolution.

As I've always understood them... the stories in the Bible are less significant because they happened at some moment in history than because their underlying dynamics seem to be happening in all moments. We are all Cain, struggling with our feelings about a sibling who seems to be more blessed than we are. We are always escaping the enslaved mentality of Egypt and the idolatry we practiced there. We are all Mordechai, bristling against the pressure to bow in subservience to our bosses.

But true believers don't have this freedom. Whether it's because they need the Bible to prove a real estate claim in the Middle East, because they don't know how to relate something that didn't really happen, or because they require the threat of an angry super-being who sees all in order behave like good children, true believers - what we now call fundamentalists - are not in a position to appreciate the truth and beauty of the Holy Scriptures. No, the multi-dimensional document we call the Bible is not available to them because, for them, all those stories have to be accepted as historical truth.

Forget the fact that this is pretty much impossible to do. The Bible contradicts itself all over the place. There are even two different creation stories! (One in which Eve is created at the same time as Adam, and another where she is grown from his rib. And they're less than a page apart.) Forget that the myths of the Bible had already been understood as mythology by the pre-Biblical cultures from which many of them came. And forget that the Bible comments on its own stories, as stories, directly! On numerous occasions, the narration asks its hearers whether they get the joke.

That's because, for the Torah's first hearers (Torah is the first five books of the Bible), all those jokes really were jokes. They understood that Jacob's sons weren't really the fathers of the Twelve Tribes of Israel, but parodies - racist parodies, at that - of the qualities that had come to be associated with each of these existing groups. They understood that the "plagues" against Egypt were literary desecrations of the Egyptian gods. (Blood desecrates the Nile, which was a god. Locusts desecrate the corn, a god, and so on.)

That the Bible could be understood metaphorically helped people relate to its "God" metaphorically, as well. It's not that God is some character who really exists, but a way of relating to the events in the world as they unfold. No one can grasp this, however, if they're stuck believing.

So I think it's time those of us who have transcended this primitive approach to collective storytelling to speak up. This liberation from belief systems is precisely what the Bible is about. A people liberate from the death of a creationist model of reality and go out into the desert to write their own laws.

It's analogous to the story of America, in fact, where a bunch of people leave religious oppression in order to write a Constitution as an evolutionary document - something that, instead of being believed in forever, is understood to be an ongoing process. A participatory event.

Right now, America's true believers are locking down its laws along with its Bible. They are fighting the science of evolution because it accepts that things change over time - and such change is incompatible with static, everlasting truths. They are doing to today's progressives the very same thing that the Bible's Egyptians were doing to the Israelites. And they're doing it in the name of a God who they believe they'll meet when they die. This is the very mindset and behavior the Bible was written to stop.

Perhaps the best way to kill their God, in fact, is to take charge of the Bible. It is - in my own opinion as a media theorist - the Greatest Story Ever Told, and deserving of our continued support and analysis. For my part, I'm writing Testament, which I hope will bring these stories - told both in their Biblical context and as a near-future sci-fi fable - to people who might never have stumbled across them before."

Colbert Bitchsmacks Bush - Update II

Colbert Lampoons Bush at White House Correspondents Dinner-- President Not Amused?:

"A blistering comedy “tribute” to President Bush by Comedy Central’s faux talk show host Stephen Colbert at the White House Correspondent Dinner Saturday night left George and Laura Bush unsmiling at its close. "

Updated:

Gosh, what a shock. Youtube has pulled it's clips from the dinner at the behest of CSPAN. Despite the fact that numerous other clips from past dinners, [HERE] and this year's dinner NOT featuring Colbert remain online at Youtube. Obviously, just a coincidence.

You can read a summary of the CSPAN nonsense at BoingBoing here: http://www.boingboing.net/2006/05/04/why_was_colbert_pres.html

You can still download about the second half of Colbert's speech at Crooks and Liars here: http://www.crooksandliars.com/2006/04/29.html#a8104

Update II:

Available for viewing on Google Video.

Image from: http://www.flickr.com/photos/24449218@N00/140441958/

"See, it's an addiction. That means we really want it. Heh-heh-heh." - George Bush explaining oil policy.

The Heart of the Matter: Money for Our Oil Fix:

"It was only a few days ago that oil hit 75$ a barrel, and now Senate Republicans -- Republicans, remember, the champions of the free market, the ones who don't want to increase pump taxes because doing so would distort market forces -- want to give taxpayers a $100 rebate to buy gasoline.

It's all doubly strange because the president noted in his State of the Union speech that Americans are addicted to oil, and reiterated the 'addiction' word just yesterday. And now Congress wants to cure the addiction by... well, by giving us money to buy a fix."

The "Wars" on Some "Things"...

The Heart of the Matter: Drugs and Nukes:

"My own unprofessional, anecdotal take on what such a study would show: if we ended prohibition today in favor of regulation, taxation, and treatment for addiction, there would be a mild uptick in drug use. Meanwhile the price of drugs, which is kept artificially high by prohibition, would fall, denying profits to the Afghan warlords who are committed to defeating our efforts there and to the narcotrafficantes who are committed to undermining democracy in Latin America. We would also be able to redeploy all the resources noted above to the war that really matters -- the one against Islamofascism.

You know how we'll know when we're really serious about the war against Islamofascism? When the government announces that we're ending the war on drugs. Because one of these wars is a war of necessity -- by definition, an existential war, a war we cannot lose -- and the other is a war of choice. And a society that fights a war of choice while simultaneously fighting a war of necessity is a society that's betting everything it holds dear on a policy that in the end is... nothing more than a policy."

Asian Audrey Hepburn...

...eat your heart out.

Sadly, I was not posing for this picture...

...which means I'm just kind of a dork.

Baachan's 80th Birthday

For Baachan's 80th birthday we [Sandy, me, Grandma, Kawabata-san] all went down to Yanagawa for the day. The city has a bunch of canals, so we went on a picturesque little canal cruise and topped off the day eating the culinary specialty of the town - unagi. That's eel, for you unaware folks. Fun day. And we went all-out-tourist mode with the 100-yen-working-in-the-rice-field-straw-hat.

Good times.

When you're talking to Sandy in the States...

...you don't realize this is how it looks from this end, do you?



[See, I think it's cute. But Sandy'll be all mad for showing her secrets.]

My wife has quite the puzzle addiction...

...and her sister is her enabler.

Cousin Midori's Brass Band Concert

On Sunday we went to check out Midori's Brass Band Concert, which was chock full of Jr High School musical goodness. It didn't even freak me out too badly when they started singing "Oh Happy Day!" what with all it's Jesusifying lyrics and whatnot. I figure when 99.5% of them don't know anything about Christianity, it helps to prevent that glassy-eyed-drank-the-kool-aid look.

The concert was really fun though. And Midori had a well done cool little trumpet solo. [She's the second trumpet from the right in the... ummm... well... trumpet picture.]

*EDIT* Informed by my OCD-always-correcting-my-every-little-mistake wife that the brass instrument all the way to the right is a trombone, which makes Midori first trumpet on the right, third trumpet from the left.

The big picture will always be a mystery. Why you fight is something else entirely.

Geoff Klock's Blog: Joss Whedon's Buffy and Angel: The Wide Angle View:

"Angel makes clear that in resisting evil we define ourselves, which is good for us, but has nothing to do with the cosmos. In order to fight evil, Whedon's characters, who don't call on the powers of good because there are none, harness evil to fight evil while trying not to lose their humanity..."

More false Aristotelian logic games...

slacktivist: Binary Code:

"Either/or. This or that. Only this or only that. Government or individuals -- and only government (Leviathan) or only individuals. Laws or markets -- and only laws or only markets. Anarchy or tyranny.

What a weird, unreal and inhuman way of looking at the world.

Yet strangely popular.

I just don't get it. The real world, of course, doesn't look anything like this. Yet when adherents of this strange binary outlook encounter the real world, they never consider adapting their theory. Instead, they set about to change the world to make it more compatible with their theoretical construct."

"Monkey Fluids" blog is hilarious

More mashup comedy at the link.

Monkey Fluids: I Don't Believe in Organised Religion

Oh no, Cynthia.

Funny for all the wrong reasons.

Overheard in the Office: The Voice of the Cubicle - 9AM Back to Work:

"Foreign boss: [Cynthia], what are you eating?
Veronica: A breakfast burrito.
Foreign boss: Oh, no, [Cynthia]. You will never find a boyfriend."

Inspiring Alternative Educational Model

YouTube - Voices from the New American Schoolhouse (trailer):

"Voices from the New American Schoolhouse explores life outside the usual educational box. Narrated exclusively by students, the film chronicles life and learning at the Fairhaven School in Upper Marlboro, MD which practices an undiluted form of freedom and democracy that turns mainstream education theory on its head. Filmmaker Danny Mydlack enjoyed unrestricted access over a two-year period to produce this candid and unblinking encounter with kid-powered learning."