New Awesome book I read recently, I mean like really recently

Hey everyone, here's a blog topic I've been thinking about posting for a while, it's on a pair of totally sweet books I read by the same author. There's a lot to say about them, and I obviously can't say everything. So in order to give a thorough overview this will probably be a two or three part blog posting.

The first book is Journey of Souls: Case Studies of Lives Between Lives, by Michael Newton, Ph.D. Dr. Newton compiled the cases for this book and a second over years and years of notes from patient hypnosis sessions over his career probing and fitting the pieces together.

His technique is simple, anyone can do it! No, not really... He put patients under hypnosis and took them to the super-conscious level of their soul and then regressed them through previous lives to their most recent life and then through the death experience and into the astral/Afterlife realms. Now the amount of information he covers is so staggering please forgive me for rambling and chasing tangents. He covers what happens when people become ghosts. He states that souls can sometimes remain near their body or their loved ones to send them healing energy and thought to help them cope with their passing. Some souls just want to see what happens with their body or are upset with their method of passing and have trouble moving on. In almost all circumstances he says that a soul feels a magnetic pull from far off and that they easily agree to join it and eventually follow it into the astral world (let's just call it that from now on).

From there his subjects usually meet their spirit guide who is a wise human like being that they identify as having been their teacher through many, many, many afterlife periods. The teachers and their methods of teaching are almost as diverse as the personalities of people and it is important to point out that the teachers are never tyrannical, judging, or negative. Speeding up a bit, the teachers always take the souls to meet their soul group usually in a type of building, sometimes in a field, but always in a room where they are free to share their recent life experiences on earth. At this point he points out the dynamics of a soul's own soul group which has many dynamics but basically includes a person's closest family and friends incarnating in different ways and personal relationships over their lifetimes. There is so much that he covers regarding soul groups and dynamics that I might just devote a single post to that, we'll see. Needless to say there is also the topic of soul evolution and the levels he encountered. Every soul he interviewed stated that they are in the process of evolving towards the Source, or god and that eventually they will be free from incarnations on earth.

From the initial soul group meeting a soul might break off to review events from their most recent life, sometimes in a giant library setting by viewing holographic 'life books' as people refer to them. Souls are also accompanied by their guide to a meeting with Elders who are understood t o be ancient high-level teachers that set up a type of board meeting or 'afterlife interview' to help the soul honestly introspect on the important events of their previous life. These Elders interview the person usually in a round chamber while from above them a great beam of love and peace emanates from what the souls simply call 'the source' and not usually god, but definitely a loving type of energy that permeates everything and the Elders and their guides especially.

The souls can then go onto several types of activities that I won't get into right here, maybe another time. Souls stay in the astral world for different amounts of time and are not forced to return to earth but all know that they still need to return. If a soul is reluctant to return their guide encourages them and might use further discussion and forms of persuasion to see that they are stalling and almost every soul comes to the knowing that they must reincarnate if they are to progress and learn. When the soul accepts it is time to reincarnate they enjoy a second 'interview' with their guide and the council of Elders in order to plan their next life. The soul is given different options to choose from based on what they and their guide have discussed and what the Elders know is best for the soul due to their high level of wisdom and previous knowledge of that soul and their journey. When the choice to reincarnate is made the soul descends into the baby in the mother's womb and integrate with the mind of the child.

Okay, that's enough for now. This was a pretty long post and still I only scratched the surface of Dr. Newton's first book. Needless to say it was a fascinating and highly inspiring read and would recommend it to anyone interested in the subject. As a last note I must add that in many instances Dr. Newtons states that a soul's guide would often reject requests for certain knowledge that they deemed to intimate or not for Dr. Newton or the patient to know. This leads to what I feel is the important fact that he is only reporting on a limited portion of the astral world and an imperfect view of it as well. The important underlying truth here is that nobody has the whole ultimate truth especially regarding such a vast metaphysical topic as this and needs to keep an open yet discriminating mind. I believe that there is much much more remains to the astral worlds and beyond than what Dr. Newton describes in his two books which is not hard to accept if someone has done a thorough amount of research into different realms of spirituality and metaphysics.

And.... that is my final thought on the subject for now. If you still doubt that this book is awesome take note that it has 685 5 star reviews on Amazon. Boom!

Peace,
Sayonara
Jake

Two great science books to check out. THE ZERO BLOG!

Zero Blog

Hey, so there are two new books on science that I wanted to share, one I’ve already read, the other one I’m about half way through. Nonfiction is probably my favorite genre, ironically, since I like to write almost only epic YA with fantasy and scifi angles, tangents, and flavors. Not sure why, but there must be a reason somewhere. Not that I don’t like to read fiction, it’s just that I just don’t find that much fiction that I like reading, other than The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, The Lord of the Rings, and A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The classics are always great. Oh, those and Slaughterhouse Five, one of my all-time faves.

The first science book, well history of science really is called Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time, by Dava Sobel. It traces the time period before, leading up to, and during the race to find the solution to calculating Longitude. This was very, very important for sailing of all kinds obviously and would release ships from needing to stick close to shore and just praying they were on course to the British Royal Navy pretty much dominating the seas for at least a hundred years.

The cool thing is it was almost all due to the hard work of one man named John Harrison an 18^th century clockmaker who worked over thirty years to perfect the chronometer a maritime clock about the size of a pocket watch. His previous attempts are on display in a museum somewhere in England. They started out looking huge and then got smaller and smaller. The trick to making it was that all clocks up until then had been pendulum clocks that got out of whack and off time when subjected to the swaying of a ship. Others had their oil and gear messed up due to changes in atmospheric changes like temperature, pressure, and humidity that resulted in loss or gain of time and in the worst situations total seizing up and ruin.

Without knowing their longitude sailors had to use dead reckoning which was basically guessing or using maritime ‘intuition’ to determine where their destination was or just hug the coastline or sail along a latitude and then take a straight shot from that known location. All of these methods led to extra long voyages, shortening of rations and a heightening threat of scurvy, or in the worst cases wreckage and loss of the entire vessel.

The chronometer basically allowed the sailors to keep the constant time of their home port. Then at noon when the sun was its highest the sailors compared this to the home port clock and the hour difference was calculated into distance difference and thus the sailor could determine their longitude and have a good idea of where they were and not crash into huge nasty, pointy rocks.

I suggest that if you don’t want to read the book, check out the Wikipedia page on it just to get a more in depth idea of exactly what it’s about. If you like science, engineering, and history this is a really interesting read.

The second Book is called Zero; The Biography of a Dangerous Idea, by Charles Seife. In this one the author traces the concepts of zero and infinity and details how they have been so closely interrelated and ultimately considered to be two sides of the same coin. The author traces its appearance in Babylonian mathematics, all the way through the ancient Greeks, the Egyptians, the Roman Empire, the dark Ages, then the Renaissance, and all the way up to Quantum Mechanics and possibly beyond(Like I said, I’m not quite finished yet.) I don’t quite understand all the fancy math ideas, especially once he gets to Calculus, but it was interesting once the same and it’s not hard to appreciate how it was such an important concept to early mathematicians that struggled with it and rejected it all the way up to those that embraced it and invented the irrational numbers and the different types of infinity and how to count them(whewww! That last part is a mind bender!).

Since it is basically tracking the history of science I think a really important thought experiment is to try to think of where we are getting science wrong now and think about where it is going and how. Think of one of Arthur C. Clarke’s maxims; “If an old scientist says something is impossible he is most probably wrong. If a younger scientist says something is possible it most likely is.” That wasn’t a perfect quote word for word, but you get the idea.

Well, anyway, those are two of some of the best books I’ve read recently and if you’ve got the time and desire I definitely recommend them as easy, quick reads.

Take care

Sayonara!

Jake

The Sports Blog, better known as the futbal/football blog

Hey everyone, so I've recently really gotten into this little sport called futbol or football. That's what it's called over almost 80% of the world that only the United States and Australia call Soccer. I think it's super awesome and will from now on refer to it as football since you actually play it by kicking a thing that looks ball shaped with your foot unlike American football where you mostly use your hands to pass, catch, run with something that looks like an egg. The Brits refer to American Football as armored wank ball which is just hilarious and in no way offensive. You shouldn't be offended American Football fans, it's entertaining to learn new things about other places and cultures and mix it up a bit right? Right;)

So, I slowly got into this sport of futbol by playing the video game Fifa which stands for the world governing body of football, or something to that affect. The game is super fun and I have progressed from getting waxed on a daily basis to being able to beat the computer every time. But what will happen when I face my old human opponents remains to be seen. The game allows any league team to play any other or any country squad. In the future I will use this to evaluate impossible scenarios such as; who is the better defender, scorer, Wayne Rooney playing for England national squad or Wayne Rooney playing for Manchester United?

 Now watching the game on television and following it online, or in print is another task in and of itself. Being by far above and beyond the most popular sport in the world there are just so many leagues and players to know and keep track of. I'm starting slow, but reading regularly. But if I start memorizing the previous leading scorers of the Czech Republic top league then I will need admission to a Shick Shadle like facility for Futbol Obsession Disorder, or FOD. And I'm sure such a thing exists within the London city limits.


Since I'm new to football I tend to use comparisons to other sports in trying to understand it. For example the excitement of scoring a goal in football and the impact on the game is equal to a single basketball player scoring a ten point basket. It isn't impossible to overcome a ten point deficit in basketball, but it puts you behind for sure. Losing by three to nill in football is a thrashing, similar to losing by thirty in basketball, not a pretty picture. This analogy works except when evaluating goals per game average; a football player averaging 1 goal or more per game is straight killing it, and is much more impressive than a basketball player averaging ten points a game, more like 25 or 30 points per game.

You can even compare players like Christiano Ronaldo is like a Lebron James type player, super powerful, fast and a scoring machine. And Messi can be a more prolific Allen Iverson, a mighty mouse that goes and goes and scores like a maniac, except that I'm sure Messi likes 'practice.'

Now in defense of armored wankball, I'm a fan, especially the Seahawks, and I've followed it all my life to some extent even though now I follow sports in general maybe a third as much as I used to. I still feel like I've entered a bizarro world or alternative Earth when I think that the Seahawks actually won the Superbowl.  And I really believe it will never stop shocking me, it was just an incredible experience. Can they do it again this year? Who knows? Let's find out. Go Hawks!!!
later
jake

Review of TMNT

Hi everyone, I was going to do a review of two science books I've read recently, but I can't find the correct author and title for one of them so that will have to wait.

But instead I will review that movie that no one I knew wanted to see, but I saw anyway, the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles! And boy was it about what I thought it would be. Nothing surprised me or surpassed expectations in any way. Let's just say its a rental or just skip it if you're on the fence about it.

First off, I loved the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie, watched the cartoon, and read the comics. It's been a wildly successful and popular franchise considering Eastman and Laird basically created it as a joke.

But the CGI in the new movie looks good, don't get me wrong, the turtles look great, its just that their design looks creepy. It's the same problem with any movie that relies too much on CGI, the viewer doesn't emotionally relate to something that looks and feels fake, ex. Transformers, Spiderman swinging, etc... That said its no wonder there was an article in the Seattle Times a couple of days ago about how Hollywood has seen the worst box office attendance drop off in thirty years. This reliance on CGI to create un-relatable images is further compounded by the fact that so many movies are now either sequels or reboots; glaring examples are Robocop, Total Recall, Predators, Terminator 4, TMNT, Star Trek, and basically anything new with the word Star Wars attached to it. But there's a logical but flawed reason for remaking all these action movies from the late 70's and 80's=they are fricking, legit classics. That was the Golden Age for action cinema, Hollywood knows this, and they want to recapture it but are just going about it the wrong way unfortunately. It's sad, but I think eventually that things will loosen up in Hollywood and the CGI movement will mature to the point where maybe we can see some more classics that were creative, funny, and daring like Predator, Gremlins, Superman, Alien, and Caddyshack just to name a few.

Anyway, that's my movie rant for this week. Hopefully soon I will change topic and write about those science books I read that really were fascinating.
Until then, later.
Jake

Hey, just wanted to share some great books on cutting edge science and history. The history is only cutting edge because the mainstream establishment has suppressed it for a long time now in order to smooth out any opposition to their dogmatic beliefs.

A brief aside on that last point; these are good people that are deluded by what is called the "hubris of modern man," i.e. the unspoken cultural assumption that just because we have atomic energy, planes, the internet, and iphones that we are super advanced in all aspects of life and that all our scientific theories and theories on history and archaeology are therefore true. This takes the unfortunate form in the mainstream denying publication and press to alternative theories outside the norm, thus assuring there is no ability to reasonably quote and research them in a fair way, therefore supporting their claim that they are fringe and useless.

Here are three books I have read recently and one I am currently reading that are blockbusters in terms of inspiring facts that have been suppressed in favor of more boring, mainstream theories. And by boring I don't mean in the entertainment sense, but in the quality sense, in that these cutting edge science represents deep truths that are awe inspiring, uplifting, and just all around awesome, which is not so with most theories that are hammered into our brains and worshiped like religious dogma by the scientific elite.

Here they are;
1. Forbidden Archaeology, by Michael Cremo.
2. Forbidden Science Edited by J. Douglas Kenyon.

3. The Ancient Giants Who Ruled America. By Richard J. Dewhurst

4. The Lost Star of Myth and Time. By Walter Cruttendun.

I could go on and on about these books, but they touch on a few points that are just mind-blowing; the fact that ten to twelve foot giants lived in the US thousands of years before the Native Americans(these giants were the Mound Builders and Native Americans have no oral history of mound building.)

The theory that Atlantis was a more technologically and spiritually advanced civilization than we have now and that in that time or even many years before Atlantis there was a worldwide culture that shared many beliefs, languages, and rituals(pyramids, mummification, hieroglyphics, and many other things.)

The great Pyramid of Giza complex and the sphinx are much older than believed. There is proof of heavy rainfall erosion on the Sphinx which hadn't existed on the Giza Plateau for more than 8,000 years. There is not proof that the Pharaoh Kufu had the pyramid built.

Anyway, hope you check out some of these books. I will be sharing more in the future and they usually will be along the same lines of discussion. Until then stay frosty.

Sayonara

Jake

P.S. This maverick view towards science and the establishment is fundamentally essential to advancement. Tons and tons of advancements have come from outside the establishment, meaning they weren't bogged down in dogma and publish or perish, toe the line ideology. Ex. Einstein did his best stuff as a patent clerk(Quote from Ray Stanz in Ghostbusters ;) which is true and look what he accomplished.

The spirit of science should be creative, always challenging itself to grow, expand, and break out of its old boundaries. When human nature and psychology reach that point of critical mass, humanity will accomplish greater things than we can even dream of now.

Drum roll......My review of The Guardians of the Galaxy

     Okay, so I saw The Guardians of the Galaxy on Thursday like I said I would and well this is what I thought. It pretty much exceeded my lowered expectations a little with the humor, the great oldies music the main character listens to, and the great villain. Finally a strong, non CGI(computer graphic images) villain in a Marvel Movie(but it still had a nonsensical, cosmically confusing mcguffin, 'the orb' with the 'infinity stone', which just seems to be an incredibly powerful thing that can do anything and has no restrictions or rules. Basically a plot saving Ace in the whole for the writer who just makes it do whatever he wants it to do to move the plot along. Kind of like the ether power in the second Thor movie, which I really liked but with the mcguffin being the greatest weakness.) For those non initiates into movie Nerdome a mcguffin is an object in the plot that every character wants and is fighting over. See Tesserac, Holy Grail, Arc of the Covenant, etc....

     I think if I saw it again that maybe I would care about the characters more. Their motivation for them to be friends and stick together was a little weak, but hey this is a Marvel movie in the age of huge studios micromanaging things to death, see the comments of Jose Padilha on directing the new Robocop. He basically said the studio denied 9 out of 10 ideas he had and it was a terrible experience. But like a good employee he retracted them and apologized. So given that I don't expect a Star Wars, Lawrence of Arabia, or a Seven Samurai to come out of Marvel anytime soon. Moving on, yes the movie had an INSANE amount of CGI, ships, characters, backgrounds, laser blasts, almost everything got the makeover. Note the long list of digital artists in the credits, almost took up half of the closing crawl. But for that amount of CGI I have to say I was pleased with it. It has to be remembered that this CGI era is only sixteen years old and as an era it's still finding itself.

    I will support this last point there and then I'm done. In the Legend special features Ridley Scott said that movies should be mostly close up shots and some 3/4 shots, but very little long shots. This helps the audience can build an emotional connection with the characters. Star Wars used this to perfection by utilizing what George Lucas called "documentary style" which means lots of handheld, lots of camera movement within a scene, and mostly close ups to 3/4 distance shots. There is even an anecdote that the producers and suits at Fox were angry that he was spending lots of money creating beautiful sets but only filming a small portion by not using long shots. To use too many long shots would have worked against him. And the high use of establishing longshots by directors today is what is not establishing a connection with the characters as well as it could. There are almost too many examples to list here. Just watch any Transformers, Marvel, or Tom Cruise vs. aliens movie since 1998 and you will see that the director wants to maximize the use and full exposure of the entire CGI image rather than go back to the basics of cinematography. This also includes lack of interesting camera angles and movement which is basically said word for word by the special affects engineer on the special features to Big Trouble in Little China, whose name I just Goodled, its Richard Edlund. I love Wikipedia;) In that feature he recounts how they spent THOUSANDS of dollars on creating the floating blob head with like five eyes only for it to have like one minute of screen time. Okay, guilty on liking special features;) Anyway, this blog was too long, but I had a lot to say. Thanks for reading anyone who did and leave a comment if you like.

Next up the movie no one wants to see but I WILL SEE NO MATTER WHAT, the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Sayonara.
later
jake

Hey, everyone. This Thursday I'm going to see the new Marvel movie, The Guardians of the Galaxy. I'm kind of excited to see it, not gonna lie, but am setting low expectations because it's another comic book movie. Don't think I hate comics, I collected them as a kid and loved the art work, but now looking back I never collected them for the interesting stories or characters. Now Tim Burton's Batman and the Christopher Reeves Superman series are my favorite comic movies, but the new species of comic movies are steeped in so much CGI that something is lost I think. Plus, I'm not a fan of the new 'dark and dingy' comic movies that seem to be really popular, like the Dark Knight series. There is a quote by Jim Henson that I whole heartedly agree with where he basically says that "Life should be fun and filled with joy all the time." So, I frankly am tired of the dark and dingy look myself.

I'm totally open to liking Guardians, but my expectations are pretty low. People are free to say that it's the new Star Wars, that's their opinion and they are welcome to it. But, we'll see. I will post my opinion after I see it.

later
jake

This past weekend I attended the PNWA writer's conference and it was awesome. I saw old friends from the UW Extension writing programs, heard some good talks(Robert Dugoni, James Rollins, Gerri Russel among others) and ate some ok food at the SeaTac Hilton hotel. Got some good feedback on my novel, some agent interest, and ideas on how to get in the most perfect shape I can right now before I send it off. In all it was a really fun time, about the best conference I've been to so far. And this was my sixth! Seems like I'm a long ways from sitting in Jim Thayer's class talking about his ten rules of writing. But it's been a great journey.