watch tHe skies

There’s a very interesting article over at OneKindAct, considering the impact of making judgements on others. My view of judgement is that it’s near impossible to prevent making judgements on people (a lot of it is unconscious), and so I like to go with the flow of my neuro-physiology and make positive judgements, such as “I bet this person has lots of interesting stories to tell” or “I wonder what I can learn from this person today”, or even, if the ‘first impression’ (ie that unconscious dislike) is bad “I wonder how this person is going to prove to me that my first impression wasn’t quite right”.

Because I’m looking for the silver lining, I’m amazed how they become clear to me with alarming regularity.

Enjoy the article over at:

http://www.onekindact.com/2007/06/09/what-we-see-judging-others/

So day 2 of being on MySpace and I am still trying to come to terms with the whole concept. I was really struggling with it until Sir William of Shatner became my “friend”… then suddenly I was star struck and realised that MySpace is indeed one big ruse to cheat at the pub game “Six degrees of Kevin Bacon”. I mean, If I’m only a MySpace link away from William Shatner and Keira Knightley, then linking to Kevin Bacon is a doddle, surely?

Then for a few brief minutes I got very carried away linking to lots of other people that are famous and I would like to link to - Derren Brown, Faithless, James, and I eagerly await links from Mr. T and the Hoff for my page to really impress. Very disappointed that Gil Gerard (Buck Rogers) doesn’t have a page.

So last night I excitedly showed Jen my page, and in particular my link to Captain Kirk. She had a good look around it and said “What’s the point?”

“You get links from people, look, Faithless, down there.”

“Why?”

“er, because that’s what you do.”

“Why?”

“I’ve no idea.”

“Pointless.”

And she has a point. For all the fuss I still don’t understand what MySpace does.

So Jen and I finally settled down to watch the finale to the third season of Lost, since our mid-season apathy with the show, the producers have turned down the questions, switched answers to ‘11′ and had our hearts racing towards a pretty impressive finale, with lots of twisty turny things and ultimately, a satisfactory conclusion to the last six months’ viewing.

Leaving only a small cliffhanger, it would actually be possible to stop watching the show after that ending, however as Jenny says “the fact that you can stop watching now makes me want to watch it more”. Go figure.

My brother was explaining to me MySpace on saturday… all of the cool stuff, networking and the like, so I decided to set up a MySpace page and copy blog posts over there.

So if you are a MySpacer and want to be my friend, head over to:

http://www.myspace.com/_watchtheskies

And say hello, add yourself as my friend and we can do MySpacey things together.

Saturday saw me take a trip to my local Supermarket. I was after standard fare - bread, cheese, milk, you know the sort of thing. Anyway I wandered in there to get my stuff and was left speechless when I arrived at the milk isle only to find that it now offered cheese.

“So what?” you ask “cheese was on your list”. And yes indeed it was, and you are right and yet this location change was echoed throughout the whole supermarket. Everything had been moved, and it meant I had to wander down every isle to find everything I wanted. Consequently shopping took a lot longer than I had hoped.

The shifting of product within a shop is common practice. It is designed to shake the customer up so that they do indeed have to traverse every isle searching for their purchases, which means that they have to cast an active eye over every product the shop has to offer.

You see our mind is an incredible learning machine, and most of the learning is done unconsciously. Whenever you are doing a new activity, your unconscious mind is paying close attention, and once you have done the activity enough times, it tells your conscious mind “it’s okay, I can do this for you!”, autopilot is engaged and your unconscious mind will do your shopping for you, leaving your conscious mind to think about other things. (more…)

When I’m coaching someone, we look at the things people spend most of their time on, and then compare these to the things they really want. Do you think the two are aligned? Not very often… if they are then they probably don’t need coaching. 

You’re either aligned or you’re not. There is a unique set of values for YOU, that if followed, will allow you to live a fulfilled life, doing things that meet your base needs as a human being. If your current priorities are fully aligned with these, then congratulations! I’d love to hear about it. You probably have a real sense of contentment and fulfilment all of the time. Whereas for many of us we feel that in fits and starts, when we happen to do something that resonates with who we are.

If your current priorities are significantly “out of whack” with what’s REALLY important to you, you are probably very busy, constantly rushing, a little stressed, and when you get what your chasing - it’s never enough! You turn around and go: “NEXT!”. This is because we can never get enough of what we don’t really want. Understanding the difference between what we chase and what we want is a good step to doing what you love. (more…)

Since Ben’s arrival our cinema trips have been severely rationed. Now we need to procure a babysitter (Jen’s mum), get Ben ready for bed in time and head off to the flix, whereas before we used to go on a whim.

So our trips are precious.

And yet this year the summer blockbusters have looked enticing, and there were two films that we were both eagerly anticipated.

First up was Spider-Man 3. With 40 or 50 years of rich storylines and characters to pick from, as well as the same team of people who made Spider-Man 2 (up there with Superman: The Movie and X-Men 2 in my estimation), and a budget of some $250m how could they possibly go wrong? Well they did. Big time. High expectations and too much pressure to cram in bad guys and SFX left us with a bloated, badly paced, idiotic mess of a film that shouldn’t even be on the same shelf as its predecessor. That bad? You ask. Yes, it is all over the place, even at 2.5 hours there simply isn’t enough screen time for you to care about any of the characters. If they had ditched Venom and gone just with Sandman then we would have had a decent movie. Unfortunately the need to cram in all of these plots meant that none of them got the attention they deserved and the whole thing left me with a sour taste in my mouth.Jenny was not pleased. A rare evening out and it was wasted by this movie.”Don’t worry, Jen, Pirates 3 is out in a couple of weeks, that will be good..”

Famous last words.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse Of The Black Pearl is one of my favourite movies. It’s got a great plot, fantastic gob-smacking special effects, a superb cast and the whole thing is conducted in such a spirit of fun that it is still watchable after 4 or so years on DVD. Its sequel - Dead Man’s Chest didn’t quite reach the heady heights of the first movie. Suffering from over-indulgence in places, and a convoluted storyline, it was a very funny movie, wrenching up the camp factor from the first one. We really enjoyed it and looked forward to At World’s End.

Unfortunately this movie made Spider-Man 3 look like an Oscar winner. I can forgive the total change in tone (it’s not that funny) if the story made any sense (it doesn’t) or they gave the audience a chance to follow it (they don’t). Characters from the first film come and go with no reason given (exactly why did the squid that was so fundamental to the last movie turn up dead?), new plot items and concepts are introduced in conversation that suddenly become vitally important, and characters suffer from complete amnesia when it suits the writers (surely Chow Yun Fat would have known Elizabeth wasn’t Calipso if he was one of the pirates that bound her?).

The result is a complete mess of a film, that even the special effects can’t save.  I tried really hard to like this movie however it just wasn’t likeable. By the end credits I couldn’t wait to get out of the cinema.

Jenny was fuming. 2 nights out wasted. That meant Shrek 3 was off the table. We just couldn’t risk another duff movie.

And so these so called blockbusters have put my cinema viewing schedule in jeopardy. The scary thing is these movies will make so much money, sequels are inevitable. I just hope that if these franchises come back then they give them the time to actually produce entertaining films with decent scripts that we can enjoy.

Rant over.

Recently I’ve been reading a book by Robert Dilts about belief systems. Beliefs are interesting for many reasons, the main one that interests me is how they constrain our actions.

The funny thing about beliefs is that they aren’t fact. In fact what is fact… when does belief become fact? Before Sir Isaac Newton “discovered” gravity, did people wantonly jump off tall buildings? I would suggest no for the most part. So those people pre-Newton believed that jumping out of buildings was dangerous, even though they did not know why. And the fact that jumping out of buildings has been hazardous in the past does not mean it will be so for you, as banks often say, past performance is no indication of future situations. (more…)