Archive for category Wild Friday

Just when we were beginning to relax at sea and forget about pirates, a new band of “bandits” are out there!

Aqua Expeditions has captured the Amazon River Bandits.  The CEO of the company, Francesco Galli-Zurgaro through Peruvian news agencies, announced the capture of six armed “bandits” who robbed passengers on July 26th on the river vessel cruising the Amazon in Peru.

All of the crew and passengers involved were not harmed, and passegers continued with their Peruvian travel.

The Aqua riverboat accommodates twenty-four passengers, and cruises are continuing as planned reports travel publication Travel Pulse.

Mr. Galli-Zurgaro’s company has instigated measures to prevent any further incidents which includes the “discreet stationing of security personnel on board”.

Aqua Expeditions feels the quick action in apprehending the “Amazon pirates” will bring a close to any future situations. 

www.aquaexpeditions.com

Whenever I think I’ve lost my “edge” my son, Charlie, updates me!  He referred to Mind Before Matter as a “super cool book”.  Written by doctorate holders telling their stories from four different perspectives: science, philosophy, PSI (parapsychological phenomena) and communion.

As I commented when I wrote about the Zero Point Field, we create our own reality.  The focus here is “consciousness is the prime foundaton of reality”.  Ergo ” is this not a way of saying the same thing?”

About every 50 or so years we intelligencia have  a mad urge to explain ourselves in relation to our concepts of what is and what might be.  The arena usually becomes as the essays point out, “Circular debates ending in belief system statements.”  Of course, this leaves them open-ended so we can continue endlessly.

It is written that “The Chasm that had been opened between scientific material universal consciousness; a dead mechanical universe vs. a living universe is being closed!  The change in thinking leads towards a mechanical universe (shades of 1984) vs. God.  And, during the last 300-400 years we’ve grown up along with our science to appreciate science and spirituality

To paraphrase Poincare: logic, therefore, remains barren until awakened by intuition. Quantum physics was the next leap led by such great minds as Einstein and Bohm.  Part of their discoveries was that the observer affects the observed:  “The iceberg in the ocean only appears separate from the sea.”

With the philosophy essays are, “Part of a new paradign realization process will be the continued rift between science and spirituality.  As one stumbles through long words and obtuse phrases, it smells of creativism, positurst reductionism, a “lifeless universe” and that lonely feeling that makes your stomuch hurt.

PSI is very slowly being accepted into mainstream studies as a measuring device.  Don Carroll, who summarized the book wrote “(We) need to name and measure which has its purpose, but as we are warned … “science is based on osbservation, and if science cannot measure, and observe repeatedly, the events are considered suspect.’

Trish Pfeiffer and John E. Mack, MD edited Mind Before Matter.  My brain is still maturing, but I applaud another “Thinking Man’s Book”.  Well done.

www.intuitive-connections.net

Just the thought of flying trans-Atlantic or trans-Pacific exhausts me!  Los Angeles to Kuala Lampur (affectionately known as “KL”), New York-Cairo.  The most prominent competitive edge for any airline is service and cabin comfort.

Japan Airlines (JAL) recently celebrated the 50th anniversary of their Los Angeles to Tokyo service.  Cabin service is, of course, important, but you also have to get up and walk around.  I can handle a tourist class seat for three hours.  On my flight from Los Angeles via Tokyo to “KL” with Malaysian Airlines, I crawled out of the plane at Tokyo and begged for an opening in business or first class.  I was willing to pay the difference.  It didn’t happen.

JAL has a 4-class service with tourist, business and first, but on the new 777-300ER aircraft on US routes to Asia they have first, executive and Premium Economy Class seats along with Economy class.  The four class cabin features 8 JAL Suites in lst class, 77 JAL Shell Flat NEO’s in Executive class and 46 JAL Sky Shell Seats – the world’s first shell type seating in the premium economy class.

Oh, to occupy a lst class JAL suite!  It’s 20% larger than the old JAL Skysleeper Solo Central seats, upholstered in pale grey leather with 5″ wide, thickly padded armrest.  In the upright position, there’s an ottoman on which to raise your feet.  Should you be travelling with someone else, and travel in a pair of suites, you can raise or lower privacy partitions located between them.  Enjoy Bose noise cancelling headphones and a 19-inch personal TV screen with movies, music or video games using JAL”s audio-visual on demand entertainment system.

Many moons ago I flew first class to London on Pan Am’s first grand 747 with dinner “upstairs” on a real table with 3 other passengers, linen tablecloth, china service and silver tableware  We were served “real” food.  Today the food seems to be made of plastic and tastes weird.

Now, on long hauls, you can order what you want when you want it in first class.  There are many airlines with menus and choices – vegetable, Kosher, meatless, etc.

On my last trip from Los Angeles to Honolulu I sat at the very front of the plane, in a middle seat.  I fell asleep having taken a connecting flight to Los Angeles earlier.  On awakening I found that my head had rested on the shoulder of a rigid Japanese gentleman who had braved my heavy head for hours.  I thanked him in Japanese.  He grunted, “Ah ha!”  And so ended my sleep.  We’ve come a long ‘way, baby.

While no one knows for sure, people all over the world throughout time have had experiences of what they call ghosts. Do ghosts really exist? It all depends on how you define “ghost.” What are ghosts?

A rational explanation is that our experience of ghosts, or paranormal phenomena, can be attributed to our evolutionary survival mechanisms. It is a way for us to explain things that we don’t understand. One scientific explanation is that what we experience as ghosts is actually caused by sound waves trapped inside of buildings.

For some reason, New England seems to have more haunted houses than the rest of the country. Paul Eno, paranormal investigator in New England, has some very interesting opinions on the subject. Paul Eno’s explanation of ghosts goes beyond the rational or scientific explanations, suggesting a whole new way of looking at reality as a multiverse.

Within the multiverse, parallel universes exist. It is a complex idea that has been around for a long time, it is just tough for a lot of people to understand, much less believe. Do you believe in the multiverse?

2012 is the next 1999. A whole lot of people seem to believe that on 12/21/2012 we will experience the end of the world as we know it. This date is based on the Mayan calandar.

I remember New Year’s Eve, 1999. I avoided big crowds. It was pretty anti-climactic. Nothing really changed.  I had friends who had stocked up food and other survival items in their basement. They have since quit their religion, got divorced, and moved on with their lives.

There are plenty of books, websites, and even a movie out there about 2012, the Mayan calandar, predictions and prophecies, postulations and speculations. There is so much information out there about it, I would recommend going to the library to research if you are seriously interested.

I think an even more interesting question than “is the world as we know going to end in 2012″ is “why do we seem to want the world to end?”

Some people may think that chickens are stupid and harmless birds. These people have never observed chicken behavior on a close level.  Yesterday two of our six hens hatched out some baby chicks for the first time ever. The other hens proceeded to tear one of the chicks limb from limb in a vicious attack, before we were able to rescue it. We were able to rescue three other chicks, however, and separated them and their mothers from the other vicious chickens.

Observing chicken behavior can be entertaining, but this was downright horrifying. And the contrast – first there are these sweet hens laying on their eggs and hatching out and caring for and protecting these cute little fuzzy chicks, and then there are the other hens, tearing apart a little baby chick in the dirt. So, I found some good merchandise – a bag that says “WARNING, beware of the killer chickens.”

If chickens were the size of dinosaurs, there would be no human race.

In the 1930s, an unusual 900 year-old skull was found in Mexico. When finally brought to light and studied in the late 1990s, some came to the conclusion that this “Starchild Skull“  is actually an extraterrestrial-human hybrid.

This mystery skull does not fit neatly into any known human skull deformations. But why would this lead researchers to jump to the conclusion that it was alien?

Apparently, Indian Legends told of “star-people” who came down and created alien-human hybrids, waiting until the offspring reached about the age of 6, when they returned to take them.

While no concrete proof has been found that the skull is actually that of a human-alien hybrid, researchers have still been unable to classify just what conditions caused the unusual deformations of this skull.

What do you think?

Well I started off this morning thinking I was going to write about the aquatic ape theory, and then I found The Moken. I went to Thailand about 12 years ago and loved the place, it’s history, it’s beautiful kind people. We even spent most of our time there around Phuket and Ko Phi Phi, and didn’t know a thing about the Moken, a group of semi-nomadic sea people, until today. Unfortunately now their way of life is threatened by tourism and the general encroachment of the rest of the world.

One thing I found fascinating about these people is that, according to one source, none of them died in the tsunami of 2005. Apparently, the fish told them it was coming. Some of them took to the mountains inland, others rescued tourists from the islands, and still others actually rode out the tsunami in their boats.

Seeing the way that these people live, it is easier to imagine that humans as a species evolved in and around water, as hypothesized by the proponents of the aquatic ape theory. What is harder to imagine is what would make people decide to move inland, away from the water. It used to be widely believed that North America was settled by the Native Americans by the Bering Strait land bridge, but more recently scientists have been looking at coastal routes as more plausible.

Some even suggest that global warming could cause cataclysmic flooding that would once again put us in a position of having to survive in a watery environment, as soon as 2012.

Ok, I actually don’t know if Bigfoot exists or not, but, like Fox Mulder from the X-Files, “I want to believe.” And I’m not the only one. Even though some Bigfoot sightings have been proven to be hoaxs, people continue to believe and look for the real Bigfoot.

The Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization claims to be “the only scientific research organization exploring the bigfoot/sasquatch mystery.” Their website includes a comprehensive sightings database, where you can search Canada and the US for reports of Bigfoot sightings. Other websites describe sightings as well.

Despite the lack of concrete evidence of this creatures existance, many people still believe and hope to find this potential primate relative. There are myths of Bigfoot-like creatures all over the world, just like there are myths of “little people” around the world, and recent evidence has shown that “homo floresiensis,” a small homind, in fact did exist simulataneously with modern humans. So why not Bigfoot?