watch tHe skies

I don’t usually quote news here, preferring to plagiarise instead, but this article over at Reuters (the only news site not blocked by the company’s SurfNazi software) really made me laugh, so I thought i’d share it with you.

A male panda at a Thai zoo has been placed on a month-long diet to avoid squashing his partner during sex, and will be shown “panda porn” to get him in the mood, the project chief said on Wednesday.

Chuang Chuang, a six-year-old male who weighs in at 150 kg (330 lb), was too big for his 115-kg, five-year-old spouse, Lin Hui, Prasertsak Buntrakoonpoontawee told Reuters.

“Chuang Chuang is not fat but he will be too heavy for Lin Hui when they mate,” he said. “The weight difference will be a hurdle to the success of their mating.”

Prasertsak said male pandas should weigh 30 kg less than their partners.

The pair have been at the zoo in the northern city of Chiang Mai since 2003 and were officially “married” two years ago. However, they have show little inclination to consummate their union.

The zoo hopes Chuang Chuang will lose 10 kg in a month on the diet, which started last week and includes fewer “cookies” and bamboo stems, and more bamboo leaves, which are harder to chew.

“Panda Porn”? blimey that’s a new one on me. Also is Prasertsak Buntrakoonpoontawee the longest name ever?

I was sorry to hear of the passing of Robert Anton Wilson. An inspired writer on many subjects, past editor of Playboy and author of one of the books that I am currently enjoying (I “moodread”, which you may not have heard of, essentially it is a word I made up which means that I have different books for different moods. Prometheus Rising gets picked up when I am in a “curious” mood. I currently have books for inspired, excited, and bored. The other dwarves are left to browse the interweb).

Anyway I digress. One of my favourite ideas in Prometheus Rising is that the mind has two main parts; a thinker and a prover. The thinker is extremely flexible, and can think any number of things. The thinker can think that the person is lucky, the thinker can think that the person is unlucky. The thinker can think that society is getting worse, the thinker can think that society is getting better. The thinker can think pretty much anything.

The prover is much more predictable: what the thinker thinks, the prover proves. (more…)

Well I have finally gotten around to adding a few new pages on the site. Firstly as I harp on about NLP and related subjects almost ad nauseam, I thought it would be useful to actually tell you what it is, or what I think it is anyway. So head over to this page to find out more and add your comments if you so wish.

Also I have finally got a contact page working, so you can hurl your insults at me straight from this site. I know it’s been a long time coming - up till now you guys have had trouble finding my email address, well this way you still don’t know it but at least you don’t need it, head over here to pass comment on anything you like.

Finally, user registration is back online again which means new people can register and leave comments on the site. You do need to be registered to comment at the moment, though that may change as I see how the system is being used.

I thought you might like to know that my positive intent article has been reprinted over at onekindact, a website devoted to the idea of doing something kind for someone every day, and spreading that word. So if you would like some inspiration, head over there and have a read through some of the great articles and comments waiting for you.

A question I am regularly asked when talking about NLP concepts like language patterns and meta-model questions is “is it ethical to influence people?” This is a strange question because it presupposes that you can NOT influence people.

Consider the human mind as a computer. This isn’t true but it’s a good model for the purposes of this discussion. Well a computer has hardware (your physical brain and nervous system) and software (your thoughts, what you know, your instincts, your consciousness and unconsciousness). The software started out very basic (a few reflexes such as rooting, diving, startling, fear of falling and the ability to learn). From these simple schemas you develop increasingly complex maps of the world around you, effectively rewriting your software and developing intricate algorithms of behaviour for particular scenarios. Language, social skills and even eating are learnt “programs” installed in to your computer. (more…)

Belief is a powerful tool. What we believe frames our every behaviour. Noel Edmunds believes in this cosmic ordering business and this affects every choice he makes. It may not work for me but I say whatever gets you out of bed has the basics of a good belief. An interesting view of the world can be taken by believing that every behaviour has a positive intent. That is - people do what they do because they hope that in doing so will generate good feelings in them. I remember this great episode of Friends where Joey challenges Phoebe to perform a selfless act. She tries all kinds of stuff but concludes that there isn’t such a thing as a selfless act because an apparent selfless act makes you feel good due to it’s apparent selflessness. So if that’s a case it would seem that this belief is one that holds at least some water, so let’s go with it and just pretend that it’s true. Personally I love feeling good and actively pursue things and actions that give me more of those good feelings.
 
However, if everyone is doing stuff to make them feel good - in the infinite possibilities of the universe it is likey that people occasionally do stuff in the pursuit of their happiness that actually hampers your own personal quest.

Normally we consider those people to be bad - because they have annoyed us, cost us time or money. Consider the overbearing boss who is forever bugging you - or the friend who seems to put a downer on your good ideas… Well they are likely doing that to make themselves feel better. Ok so that activity might be misguided, however if you can see their actions from that perspective then perhaps their traits and activities are a little easier to take, and perhaps those actions won’t bug you so much. An interesting thought. (more…)

I wonder if you saw any of Nigella Lawson’s delightful Christmas cooking programmes? Normally I avoid cooking programmes because a) they are on in the morning, and watching lunch and dinner food being cooked in the AM makes me rather nauseous, and b) I really really can’t be bothered to spend all that time searching for obscure vegetables, herbs and spices, let alone use a wok and eight saucepans to cook for Jen and I.

However, Nigella’s Christmas shows were different, and it’s not just her Christmas shows, it seems that for some reason I find her cooking show fascinating.

Now you are thinking that it’s because she’s quite saucy, and if you will, just put that to one side because there is more going on here than a Sid Jamesism can explain. I noticed that whilst watching her show, both Jenny and I were transfixed, entranced by what was going on. Fortunately I broke state and realised that what was actually happening was that she was hypnotising us. I then started to pay close attention to her language and tonality, which was very revealing. (more…)

The other day, after only 3 months’ use my lovely MDA Vario II coughed and died on me. Its light was extinguished quite literally when the backlight failed to come on any more making the screen barely readable even if you were standing on the surface of the sun (ok I know that the sun is in fact a ball of plasma, or superheated gases but let’s be honest, if you were within ten thousand miles of the sun, checking your smartphone is likely the last thing on your mind, as your mind has probably been burnt away with the rest of you).

Still I managed to call T-Mobile who, after having me turn the phone off and on again several times at the request of a stream of increasingly egg-headed technical support people, concluded that the phone was, indeed, knackered. They immediately despatched a new one by elf (this is what they do to keep the money coming in when Santa isn’t paying overtime), and it arrived within 8 working hours, which is rather marvellous.

So all is right with the world and, even better, I have a brand spanking new phone which works much better than the one I dropped, or should say, failed all on it’s own…

This week, Jenny has discovered ebay. That is to say she has finally found something to buy on ebay, discounting the 2000 beads she had me buy last year to help the guides make “ethnic” necklaces.

She has realised that quality, expensive educational toys are cheap as chips on ebay. This is because a) everyone is flogging them, b) most kids have ADD now and so can’t concentrate on one toy for more than a couple of hours without wanting something new c) they cost a lot to post and d) global warming can be singularly attributed to the carbon emitted in making all these plastic toys and disposable batteries to power them.

So she has finally caught the ebay bug and despite the fact that Ben received more presents than he could possibly play with at any one time (our lounge looks like a scene from Toy Story most days), she is logging in to my ebay account and buying tonnes of stuff for £0.99 (plus £7.50 postage). Still, it keeps her busy, and the postman will love us for continually humping around parcels that repeatedly play twinkle twinkle little star.

In the process she has depleted my paypal account (it’s where I keep my profits from ebaying, a kind of gadget offshore account, if you will), meaning that the gadget monster won’t get fed this month unless he takes a liking to Fisher Price Roll Around Treehouses…

I’ve kept off ebay pretty much since I bought my lovely shiny voice recorder, which is proving to be a very useful tool. I’ve gotten over the wierd sensation of insanity that was bothering me when using it, although to be fair I still haven’t strolled down the high street whilst dictating to myself. As a result many of the banal observations like this one are now making it to the screen rather than disappearing in to the ether.

I don’t make a habit of watching GMTv however this morning I caught five minutes where they were talking about press intrusion. Apparently the Sun newspaper and other members of its horrid little gang have agreed not to publish photos of Prince William’s girlfriend, the comely Kate Middleton. This comes after uproar (presumably in the papers, probably the Daily Mail) about press intrusion in to her life.

At the same time they were running footage of the poor girl walking down the street with cameras shoved inches from her face, flash guns going off repeatedly in her eyes. Nasty. And yet the paper said that although the photos won’t be published in the press here, the photographers will still pursue her in exactly the same manner because the demand for photos overseas makes it big business.

So I was just wondering exactly how Kate Middleton benefits from the papers not publishing photos? And how paparazzi behaviour isn’t classed as stalking and therefore against the law. If it’s legal to hound and stalk someone with a camera then it should be legal to shoot paparazzi with a gun. At least that would make it a fair fight.

Perhaps the Royal family should insist, if it can’t be controlled, that any unofficial photograph of the Royal Family and those linked, is taxed, and that the tax goes to a charity. At least someone then benefits other than the fat bloke who has been hiding in a bush all day with a telephoto lens.

The other thing that irks me is how does this stuff constitute being news? Somebody getting a parking ticket isn’t news. This is moron fodder, a distraction from actual news like people starving to death, being firebombed, flooding, global warming, terrorism, extinction etc etc - none of this crap actually matters, and all it does is divert our attention from the real news - the real issues that we as a planet should be concerning ourselves with.

Sigh. Rant over.