Hmmm?

Dan Quayle Said...

"The other day the President said, I know you've had some rough times, and I want to do something that will show the nation what faith that I have in you, in your maturity and sense of responsibility. He paused, then said, would you like a puppy?"

-Dan Quayle

Tiger Versus Mediate

US OPEN PLAYOFF!

Rocco Mediate the Underdog from Western PA

VERSUS Tiger Woods! ( NOW who do I root for?) Can't we just say it's a TIE?

I See Dead People.... Who Knew?

I read a newspaper just about everyday. Not all of it, but I do glance at most of the headlines, read what interests me here and there, and I always look at the obituaries, especially in the local paper, to see who died. Heaven forbid, someone I know dies, and I miss it.

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A funny story: My mom quit sending Christmas cards to someone because she thought he died.

Turns out it was someone with the same name. She hadn't sent him a card in 3 years. A few weeks ago I saw the guy waiting in line in the drug store, and of all things, he was reading the obituaries in the paper which he just snagged from the newstand, and he was amusing the others in line at the store by saying.... 68? I beat him. 74? Beat him, too.... 86..... he got me beat....

Anyhow, I found this cool site. It lists everyone of note who died in the past 6 months. Just in case you missed it.

Mona Lisa... Mona Lisa

Mona Lisa, Mona Lisa, men have named you

You're so like the lady with the mystic smile

Is it only 'cause you're lonely they have blamed you?

For that Mona Lisa strangeness in your smile?
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Incase you missed it, the world now knows who the Mona Lisa really is. A researcher in Berlin discovered that she is "Lisa del Giocondo, wife of Florentine businessman Francesco del Giocondo, according to notes written in the margins of a book by a friend of Leonardo da Vinci's as the artist worked on the masterpiece."

Now... onto the next mystery. Whose lovely, but sanguine face is in that Maio painting hanging in my studio?

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Hmmmmmm.

Here Comes the Sun... la la la la la..

Sometimes you find some pretty neat things looking up other things. Remember a while back I posted about the Death Clock? Well, get out, there is a Life Clock, that shows Earth's clock of life in a way that even Huckabee (who is running for President) can understand it. You see, he believes the Earth is 6 thousand years old. I wish I was kidding about that. You can easily Google him yourself if you don't believe me.

Anyhow, in a nutshell, Earth is about 4.5 BILLION years old. And some scientists calculate that the death of Earth is about 7.5 BILLION years away.

snip

"The last life may look much like the first life – a single-celled bacterium, survivor and descendant of all that came before," the authors write. Finally, even the surviving microbes "will be seared out of existence."
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The Life and Death of Planet Earth" is like its predecessor, "Rare Earth," in that the authors collected and distilled some of the latest scientific ideas about the Earth's place in the universe, Brownlee said. He hopes the new book, like "Rare Earth," will spark widespread discussion, and give people a fundamental and realistic view of the past and future of their planet.

"It's a healthy thing to think of the place of Earth among the other planets, and its place in the sun. The sun gave life and ultimately it will bring death."

Well.... so much for a happy ending.

God Speaks Again.... (but not to me)

And no, He didn't speak to George Bush again. He spoke to none other than Richard Roberts, who headed up Oral Roberts University. Reference this Sunday Morning Muse I posted about his last conversation with God in October, where God told this religious shyster we live in a "litigious" society and to fight the allegations against him. (There is a lawsuit accusing him of using university money on lavish shopping sprees, buying a stable of horses, paying for a daughter to travel to the Bahamas aboard the university jet, and let's not forget the 800 dollar cell phone bills for his wife's alleged underage boyfriends.)

Well apparently God change his mind. He told Roberts to resign. Actually, to hear Roberts tell it, God insisted.

Associated Press

On Wednesday, Roberts said God told him he would "do something supernatural for the university," if he stepped down from the job he held at the 5,700-student school since 1993.

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I'm offended by this story on so many levels:

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1. If God talks to George Bush and to Richard Roberts why won't he talk to the leaders of the Israelis and the Palestinians and help resolve their problems? Certainly a much more worthwhile conversation?

2. If God bargains with religious shysters who misuse funds gathered in His name, to promote His work, what does that say about God?

3. If God is so concerned about our litigious society, why doesn't he talk to the judge instead of insisting old Richard drop his fight against the allegations against him? I'm sure whatever the result of a court fight, any judge could be swayed to agree with God if God would just talk to him.

4.If God really did offer to "do something supernatural" for the University, yet he hasn't intervened so far with a cure for AIDS or Cancer, what party trick could he really have in mind?

I'll quit for now, I'm too worked up. Wake up people.

Ghost in the Neighborhood?

I found the following information on a haunted place website about a grave in a nearby cemetary. I went to check it out a while ago. You wonder how these things get started.

According to legend, there is a tombstone with a picture of a man with one white hand and one blank hand on it. If you put a white sheet over the top of the headstone on October 30th at midnight, then knock 3 times, the man is said to appear behind you.

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Okay, this is the grave. No, I am not going back on October 30th. In this picture the 'black hand' is a little hard to make out, but it IS there. Poor Guy. Born in 1878. Died in 1927. Hopefully rested in peace a long time. Now he's on the internet.

Past Life Regression - You Decide

I found this picture in a photo album here at the house. I thought it was just perfect for my post tonight about past life regression. An unidentified woman following a dark figure down a path. As with anything that has no definitive explanation, there are several theories about what occurs during past life regression. You can choose to believe it is reincarnation, genetic "memory" passed from cell structures through generations, or even just a fantasy. Nevertheless, something does happen during a regression, and the belief is that it can bring a person an emotional release.

When I had it done many years ago, I experienced the strange sense of being under a sort of hypnosis. It would be easy to shrug it off as simply that, but I felt as if the person who led me through the regression sort of took me down a path by asking open ended questions and I filled in the blanks. It was blissful to just let your mind go.

The way it worked, I was in a group lying on the floor of a classroom and the leader, for lack of better word, put us into a very comfortable, relaxing state and gently pushed us back through our current life's memorable moments. (Graduation, 16th Birthday, First Day of School, etc.) Eventually we went back to the very earliest thoughts we could think of, and then.... the suspension of belief, as the questions led us to the most important moment in the life before this one. All this time we "answered" the questions in our own minds instead of aloud, but every once in a while he would walk over to someone and ask what that person was "seeing" or "hearing" at the moment and it quickly became apparent that some people were having no success at all... some seemed to be making up things or showing obvious frustration at not being successful. Or quitting altogether.

Coming in as the skeptic, no one was more shocked than me to find I was experiencing, quite out of my own control, an unexpected sequence of events in this 'past life' I had entered. When asked to 'look around" and say aloud what I saw.... I saw nothing but a pair of yellow boots on my feet, and water below, as if I was on a bridge. I couldn't look up, or side to side or really anywhere. I had no idea what was going on.

The leader was fascinated by that, and came over for a more personal intervention. We 'exited' that particular 'moment' in this past life and he asked me to go to another 'important moment' in that life to see what we could learn. A series of questions revealed that I was 12 years old and living in 1902. My parents were dead and, as I sat in a wooden windowbox seat looking at a stone bridge over water out in the distance, I could hear relatives arguing over what they were going to do about me. It seemed no one wanted me. I started to cry at this point and was quite embarrassed, so the leader asked me to let this go, and instead we would go to the very last moment of this life to see how it ended.

All of a sudden--- all I could see was those yellow boots again, and the water below. This was where I had entered this life the first time....and by chance, it happened to be the last moment in that life! I had never looked up again. And those boots were the last thing I saw before I went under the water and drowned!

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Strange stuff, huh? You can't make this up. Or maybe you can. I don't know.
Past life? Fantasy? You decide. I haven't.

The Sunday Morning Muse, August 5, 2007

It's Sunday morning in America, and countless people at this very moment are hearing about Adam and Eve-- the biblical story of creation. When I was a kid in Sunday school, I wondered if Adam and Eve had two sons, then where did all the people come from?

The Christians certainly don't corner the market on the story of creation. There are countless other myths out there. Many common names we see all the time are remnants of Greek, Egyptian, Norse, and other mythologies--and they still permeate our culture.

For example: Planet Uranus.

From Wikipedia:

Uranus: It is named after the ancient Greek deity of the sky, the father of Kronos (Saturn) and grandfather of Zeus (Jupiter). Uranus was the first planet discovered in modern times.

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LiveScience presents a Top 10 list of Creation Myths that helped to define various civilizations both past and present. Adam and Eve is Number 1. Number 2 talks about Uranus... and it kind of makes you wonder why we named a planet after him. I can imagine this one below would be a tough myth to teach in Sunday School:

The early Greek poets posited various cosmogonies. The best-preserved is Hesiod's Theogony. In this hymn, out of the primordial chaos came the earliest divinities, including Gaia (mother earth). Gaia created Uranus, the sky, to cover herself. They spawned a bizarre menagerie of gods and monsters, including the Hecatonchires, monsters with 50 heads and a hundred hands, and the Cyclopes, the "wheel-eyed," later forgers of Zeus's thunderbolts.

Next came the gods known as the Titans, 6 sons and 6 daughters. Uranus, despising his monstrous children, imprisoned them in Tartarus, the earth's bowels. Enraged, Gaia made an enormous sickle and gave it to her youngest son, Cronus, with instructions. When next Uranus appeared to copulate with Gaia, Cronus sprang out and hacked off his father's genitals! Where Uranus's blood and naughty bits fell, there sprang forth more monsters, the Giants and Furies. From the sea foam churned up by the the holy testicles came the goddess Aphrodite. Later, Cronus fathered the next generation of gods, Zeus and the Olympians.

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Sheesh.. this makes eating a forbidden fruit not such a big deal. Imagine if Eve was told *not* to use the sickle. :)

The Sunday Morning Muse, July 29, 2007

Ever wonder, when you wish upon a star, exactly which star you are wishing on?

Imagine for a moment you are out in the yard, looking up at the stars. You're so impressed with the vastness of our little corner of the universe... all those little stars and planets. The big dipper is .... well, over there. You think. Constellations were never your strong point. Planets don't twinkle, right? Stars do. Ummm...

Well those days are gone. For a mere 400 bucks you can own a SKY SCOUT. Just point to whatever you want -- visible in the sky to the naked eye.... and presto! This thing tells you what you are looking at. Cool or what?

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I was skeptical at first, it's relatively new, so there are back order problems and such.... and a few bugs with downloading software for some, but it is GPS based and seems to work well, doing what it says it does, according to some of the reviews I read online. I'd like to get one.

Whatever Happened to Einstein's Brain?

Well? in short, the man who did the autopsy on him took it home and kept it in a jar! For 43 years. Imagine that. When he turned 85, back in 1998, he gave it to the pathology department at University Medical Center at Princeton.

"Eventually, you get tired of the responsibility of having it. … I did about a year ago," Dr Thomas Harvey said, slowly. "I turned the whole thing over last year [in 1998]." (Pittsburgh Post Gazette)

There's actually a book about it, and it is described here:

"Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America With Einstein's Brain" by Michael Paterniti. In its 207 pages, the book tells the story of a loopy road trip the author made in a rented Buick Skylark with Thomas Stoltz Harvey, the Princeton Hospital pathologist who performed an autopsy on Einstein in 1955, and, in a Tupperware container in the car's trunk floating in a yellowish liquid, chunks of Einstein's brain.

Oh to Live On.... Sugar Mountain

Why is it so satisfying to bite the ears off of a chocolate bunny?

How many peeps can you eat before you really don't care to eat any more?

Who eats the last few BLACK jelly beans at the bottom of the candy jar?

Remembering the Death Clock

Morbid curiousity led me to the Death Clock about 9 years ago. Someone from work showed me it. I did it on a lark. First you plug in your birthdate, and whether your outlook is NORMAL, OPTIMISTIC or PESSIMISTIC. Then there is this BMI index calculator on the site, which is part of the death date calculation. With any luck, I'm going to make it to November 22, 2043.

From the site, there's a link to find out death causes of famous people. You will have to check it out yourself to see if you believe Mama Cass actually died choking on a ham sandwich. Here's a picture of her grave:

Somehow the Death Clock sparked interest in a Death Pool at work and we actually created lists of celebrities we thought would die soon. Frank Sinatra, who was on my list, passed away that particular year, so I won the accumulated "pot" of money which turned out to be 50 dollars. As fate would have it, my father passed away the same day. I used the money to buy a black dress to wear to the funeral.