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Good Mountain Press Monthly Digest #092
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~ In Memoriam: Eddy Arnold (1918 - 2008) ~~~~
~~~~~~~~ [ Singer, notably of "Make the World Go Away" ] ~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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~~~ GOOD MOUNTAIN PRESS DIGEST #092 Published February 1, 2009 ~~~
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Quote for the Mardi Gras Month of February:

Love is the ultimate ulterior motive.
— Bobby Matherne, Writer

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~~ Click on Heading to go to that Section (Allow Page First To Fully Load). ~~
THE GOOD MOUNTAIN PRESS DIGEST #092, February 2009
Archived Digests

             Table of Contents

1. February's Violet-n-Joey Cartoon
2. Honored Readers for February
3. On a Personal Note
4. Cajun Story
5. Recipe of the Month from Bobby Jeaux’s Kitchen: Potato Salad Sandwich
6. Poem from The Missing Moment:"Death Not Interesting"
7. Reviews and Articles Added for February:

8. Commentary on the World
9. Closing Notes - our mailing list, locating books, unsubscribing to Digest
10. Gratitude

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THE GOOD MOUNTAIN PRESS DIGEST #092
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ARCHIVED DIGESTWORLD ISSUES ON THE WEB
 
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1. February Violet-n-Joey CARTOON:
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For newcomers to the Digest, we have created a webpage of all the Violet-n-Joey cartoons! Check it out at: http://www.doyletics.com/vjtoons.htm Also note the rotating calendar and clock that follows just to the right of your mouse pointer as you scroll down the page. You'll also see the clock on the 404 Error page if you make a mistake typing a URL while on the doyletics.com website.

The Violet-n-Joey Cartoon page is been divided into two pages: one low-speed and one high-speed access. If you have Do NOT Have High-Speed Access, you may try this Link which will load much faster and will allow you to load one cartoon at a time. Use this one for High-Speed Access.

This month Violet and Joey learn about GBS's Plays.

#1 "GBS's Plays" at http://www.doyletics.com/images/012709jv.gif

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2. HONORED READERS FOR February:
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Each month we take time to thank two of our good readers of Good Mountain Press Digest, books and reviews. Here's our two worthy Honored Readers for this month. One of their names will be in the TO: address line of your email Digest notification. Our Honored Readers for February are:

Theresa Chatelain in New Orleans

Bobby Duplantis in Lafayette, LA

Congratulations, T-Chat and Bobby!


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3. ON A PERSONAL NOTE:


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Out Our Way:

SURVIVING THE CHRISTMAS CRUSH


In the final two weeks of December we were fortunate to have all eight of our children with their spouses and children visit us at Timberlane. Five of them came together on December 14, and the other three came in three waves in the last week of the year. Finishing my January Digest required my filling in as much of the work between visits, but that still left a lot of photos to be selected, cropped, and fitted in appropriately on New Year's Day. Somehow I managed to catch a bit of the Rose Parade and Bowl and still cook our "prosperity meal" of cabbage, blackeye peas over rice, and cornbread, a New Orleans New Year's Day traditional meal. This year I mixed one can of Trappey's Blackeye Peas with Jalapeno's with a regular can for an extra zest. The recipe for this meal is located on the Recipe Page for November, 2007, if you're interested in trying it where you live next New Year's Day.

A few days after the first, we heard from our newest daughter-in-law, Kathryn, that the Murano vase we gave her and Rob for Christmas did not make the trip back to Bloomington, Indiana with them. I wrote her that Del said she saw Kathryn put it back in a tall white box, the one she packed

it in. Del had already been all over the house and hadn't found it. I told her what the Germans say when they've lost something, "Devil! Take your hands off my vase!" And suggested that she give that a try. I also shouted it myself, just in case. Told Kathryn that it might not work for the vase, but the next thing she misplaced. She wrote back, "Thanks for the German saying. I just yelled it and wrote it on the white board. I'll keep you posted on when it is found." She also mentioned that she recalled placing under the table in the Guest Room, so I decided to take a closer look in that vicinity, and this time I opened the bedroom door and there was the white box with the vase in it, where someone had moved it behind the door.

Another complicating factor during the Christmas season was my dad's health. Buster was hospitalized on Christmas night and didn't get out of the hospital until a week or so later. They treated him for dehydration, a urinary tract infection, and kept him for observation till he was strong enough to be released. He came back home to Mimosa where he lives alone, but has been blessed with two angels helping him, Janet and Janice. My two sisters ( I told Janice I was upgrading her from sister-in-law to sister) see that he drinks his fluids, eats his meals, and have hired some extra day-care ladies to assist him during the day.

On weekends, Buster's five children, see that he is okay. His strength is returning, but he doesn't like to use the walker and needs to be reminded to get up slowly, pushing himself up slowly as he does. He still plays a tough game of cards and on a recent Saturday cleaned out me and Del with a bunch of Pay Me's and won both games low score. No more poignant memory of Christmas Day remains than when Buster looked up from his hospital bed in the ER and said, "A heckuva way to spend Christmas."

SURVIVING THE TIMBERLANE SCREENING ROOM REWIRING
For several months we have been enjoying our movies on a new flat screen TV which was set in front of the old HD projection TV for convenience of hookup. To move it into its proper place required a lot of planning and rewiring, essentially taking apart every wire to the six TVs, four VCRs, 4 DVD players, Two DISH receivers, PS/3-Blu-Ray DVD, HD/DVD player, and Video Switching Receiver-Amplifier. After months of doing the reorganization in my head, it was time to get physical and the first week of the month and new year was the best time to get started. It took a full week out of my month.

I went through the complete disconnection and wiping the dust off everything on a Sunday, tossing or giving away the unused receivers, two broken VCRs, and one working analog TV. I had enough cables to rewire the Discovery space shuttle or my Screening Room with cables left over. Over the years I had simply added wires when adding a new device and the old unused wires were left in the bird's nest tangle hidden behind the TV's until now. By the end of Monday, I had the amplifier, in it new location, rewired to its speakers and the new TV able to play movies over the Blu-Ray player. By Wednesday I was ready for some heavy lifting and my friend Gus came over to help me heft the SONY WEGA digital TV up atop the Mitsubishi Projection TV. Maybe you haven't noticed that it's almost impossible to buy a new TV which has a flat area upon which you can place another TV. I have only two of those left now. On Thursday, I began in earnest connecting the auxiliary VCRs and DVD players and to my chagrin, I found two of them to be broken, one with no Power On ability and a valuable VHS tape stuck inside. I had to remove the top of the VCR to extract the tape. Losing two VCRs left me without the vital device I needed to provide the Master distribution of signal to all the five TVs for the final configuration. A search of local outlets finally led me to Best Buy where I found a VCR/DVD tuner/recorder. Due to digital switchover, you can no longer buy a VCR with a tuner in it for under a hundred dollars as you could until a few years ago. My Panasonic tunes both analog/digital stations and can record VHS to DVD-R disks directly by just pushing one button.
With the demise of VHS tapes, they are not being manufactured anymore, I need to begin archiving all my VHS tapes on DVD's immediately and this $300 unit handles the chore excellently. Plus it acts as the Master distribution for the five TVs. What I mean by this is that anything I play in the Panasonic can be displayed simultaneously on all five TVs using one of the AUX or ANT B inputs on them. The technique for doing this is one I stumbled on years ago. I feed the direct cable into the Master ANT IN and then the RF OUT goes to a cable amplifier with four outputs which then feed the other four TVs.

MIRACLE ON THE HUDSON
People always ask me when they find out about my Screening Room, "What do you do with five TVs?" Well, here's one answer to that question. One afternoon when I was nearly finished adding in the auxiliary devices, I had a thought of how to add another connection, so I was sitting on the floor adding the new connection when I heard Shep Smith on the FOX News channel say, "A small airplane is down in the Hudson River and has people standing on its wings."

I could not image a Piper Cub in the water with people standing on its wings, so I listened further and suddenly it bloomed into an Airbus A320, Flight 1549 of US Airways. That flight goes from Laguardia to Charlotte, NC, so I called Del's brother Dan Richards right away to make sure he knew about it and that his wife Karen was not on that flight. He said that both of them have used that flight a lot but that she was driving on the ground in Arkansas while we were talking.

I quickly turned on the four other TVs to other news channels and soon I was watching in synchrony as the other channels came on-line, what they were saying before they had any photos of the scene, what speculations came from which channel first, how the description of what happened during the flight and the landing slowly emerged, first from airline pilots's speculation to computerized simulations of the flight path from takeoff to landing in a short two minutes. I spent about two hours watching the situation unfold, with sound switching on and off for several TVs as the subjects they covered were new ones or repetitions of what I'd already heard.

Just this morning a friend sent me a PowerPoint of the event during which I learned that the A320 has a Ditch Button which immediately seals off all the places where water could enter the plane and keep it afloat as long as possible. The engineer who thought up that Ditch Button is as much as a hero as Sully the pilot, but will only get a paycheck and not have to endure any hero's welcome as Sully did.

Whenever any national event happens the Screening Room becomes my own "Situation Room" where I can monitor what's happening. I watched as the Miracle on the Hudson was taking place, even catching when David Paterson, the blind governor of New York, after waiting for Mayor Bloomberg to finish speaking, labeled the event by saying, "We'd had the Miracle on 34th Street, and now we have the Miracle on the Hudson."

That was the headline in many newspapers the next morning. Sometimes the blind see better than the seeing. As the Fox told the Little Prince, "It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye." The Fox's Secret reveals that the meaning of things is what is essential; the meaning of things is invisible to the eye. We who see are often so distracted by the plethora of visible things that we may neglect the meaning of those visible things.

CALL TO DUTY: WORLD AT WAR
At LSU, I was forced to take ROTC and that was the extent of my being in the Army, two years of classroom study, taking apart M-1 rifles, firing range, and marching in formation, etc. Best part was that I was never called upon to fire at or kill anyone the entire time. A similar thing occurred when as a Christmas present I received the PS/3 game, CALL TO DUTY: WORLD AT WAR: I never had to kill any real people, but the pixels took bloody hell. My first attempt with my three teenage grandsons telling me what to do was embarrassing, but as soon as I was alone, I got to enjoy learning how to maneuver the various weapons and clear a path for my troops. Was amazed when the game first switched to being a Russian soldier, as the game alternates between American and Russian troop movements against the Germans in the waning days of World War II.

I got to fire various American, Russian, and German weapons, any gun with bullets left in it being a vital source of protection and attack in the middle of a battle, among which I fired bazookas, panzerschrecks, mounted machine guns, drove and fired tank guns, called in bombing raids, threw hand grenades of my own and lobbed back those thrown at me, and in the end got a Purple Heart for being wounded as I raised the flag over the conquered Reichstag. All this without killing a single live human beings, just pixels. Next up: winning the Super Bowl in Madden 2009 Football game without any real people being injured. At first glance the game displays the Superdome as realistically as if it were a real game in High Definition.

WELCOME TO GRETNA
I have told people for about six months that we were moving to Gretna on January 1, 2009, and some of them said, "I thought you lived in Gretna already." Well, we did, sort of: our mailing address said "Gretna", our zip code said "Terrytown", and officially we were in the unincorporated portion of Jefferson Parish (outside of any city limits), up until January 1. Now we have two of the three together and soon the zip code may change to 70053 to match the rest of the City of Gretna. Officially, at our overwhelming vote, Gretna annexed the entire section of Jefferson known as Timberlane Estates.

I use the word Timberlane to refer to our home, but it is but one of 550 or so homes in this community which has voted to become a part of the City of Gretna. It was a joy to go to the Timberlane Improvement Association's annual meeting this year. The parish deputies patrolled our streets so infrequently that we had to hire private off-duty officers to supplement their lack of attention. Now the Gretna police have a full-time coverage 24/7 and during visits by supervisors and community patrols, we might see as many as three patrol cars in Timberlane at any time. It was always a lugubrious experience to hear the Jefferson deputies report how bad the situation was, and on the contrary, the Gretna report was very heart-warming. In just two weeks, the Gretna police patrols had answered many dozens of calls, had ticketed 77 vehicles, arresting 12 of them on outstanding warrants. Within a couple of weeks, Timberlane will become a limited access community with gates installed to prevent through traffic between Lapalco and Belle Chasse Highways.This will eliminate the unsavery individuals passing through Timberlane looking for targets of opportunity and they have already been put on notice that they better stay out completely or they will be arrested. Instead of sad statistics and excuses, we were treated to welcome news that our already safe Timberlane Estates will now have a police force on duty patrolling our neighborhood and keeping watch on our streets and homes and that the heavy cross traffic between two major highways will soon be removed from our streets.
There is a serious need for a major street or avenue between the two highways, but not through the middle of a residential neighborhood. We hope that our neighboring residential area will join Timberlane in petitioning the Parish Council for such a major avenue, probably an extension of Whitney Boulevard will do the trick.

CARNIVAL SEASON IN FULL SWING
After the Twelve Days of Christmas comes the King's Day, January 6, which officially begins Mardi Gras season locally. King cake parties begin at which an oval King Cake is sliced and whoever gets the piece with the baby Jesus in it must host the next party. At least that's how it used to be, now King Cakes are sold by the thousands and shipped fresh all over the world by Haydel's and other local bakeries. They are decorated with icing and purple, green, and gold sugar over a cinnamon roll type of baked confectionary. Plus the first carnival ball traditionally begin with the Twelfth Night Revelers. Some fifty or more Carnival Krewes have their ball first and then later have their street parades. Some Krewes have only a ball. Every hotel worth mentioning in New Orleans has a large ballroom which is packed nearly every night with a Carnival Ball until after Mardi Gras Day when the somber season of Lent begins.

I was thinking recently how dreadful it must be to live in an area when in mid-winter, no reason for community celebration occurs until Easter time. In New Orleans, it's celebration time year round. Even during many Lenten periods, the French Quarter festival and Spring Festival appear before Lent is over.

We used to hear as children that Lent is not observed during Sunday, so any sacrifices you've resolved for Lent needn't be followed on Sundays. Recently while counting the days between Mardi Gras and Easter, I found there a bunch of days over the 40 which is reputed to be the number of days of Lent. Guess what? Sundays are not counted in those 40 days! That lends some credence to get a free pass on Sundays because they are not part of the 40 days of Lent.

Del and I have a couple of Carnival Balls on our agenda, beginning with one in Slidell this Saturday night. If you don't want to wait till Easter to celebrate, hop a train or a plane or drive down join the crowd on Canal Street on Mardi Gras. That's where we'll be, our arms in the air yelling, "Throw me sumpin, Mister!"

Duh, duh, duh, dat's All, Folks!
That's it from out our way for another Digest. Till next month, God Willing and the river don't rise! Enjoy Valentine's Day and make it a great February for yourself wherever in the world you are ! ! !

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  • The Top 6 ARJ2 Reviews in 2007 and 2008
    These six books will look familiar to my long-time Good Readers because they are the most read reviews for the past two years, and in exactly the same order as you see them below. Other reviews come and go to the top of the most popular list, but these are perennial favorites. If you haven't read the full reviews, do so now. If you've read the reviews but not the books, why not read the entire book?

    1. Jean-Dominique Bauby's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly .

    A movie was made out of this one, causing large jump in readership of this Review. Del and I saw the movie and it is worth a look, but only in this book itself, can you find the blood, sweat, and yes, tears of Jean-Dominique, letter-by-letter as he dictated it by blinking his eyes.
    Excerpt from Review:

    With "locked-in" syndrome due to some event in his brain stem, Bauby is completely paralyzed, able only to move his left eye and blink. Otherwise completely rational, this former editor of Elle, a prestigious Parisian magazine published in twenty plus countries, is completely bed-ridden, breathes through a respirator [diving bell], and is fed through a feeding tube. Using his eye blinks, he is able to communicate and write this book.

    2. Rudolf Steiner's Faith, Love, and Hope

    Steiner tells us of the three revelations of importance to humankind. The first two will be as familiar to most as the third will be a surprise. The first revelation is the Sinai Revelation in which Moses received the Ten Commandments. The second revelation he calls the Palestine Revelation which gave us the Gospels of the New Testament. The third revelation occurred in the middle 20th Century — it consisted of what is referred to in the New Testament as the Second Coming of Christ in Glory. The glorified body is a phrase which refers to the etheric body or a body in the etheric plane. Christ has been intervening in human destiny from the etheric plane on Earth for almost seventy years as I write these words. Steiner gives us an example of how this intervention proceeds.

    [page 10] There will be people, for instance, who, while carrying out some deed, suddenly become aware . . . of an urge to refrain from what they are doing, because of a remarkable vision. They will perceive in a dreamlike way what appears to be an action of their own; yet they will not be able to remember having done it.

    What these people are experiencing is the bleed through of information from their karmic destiny, a deed from some past lifetime, is entering their minds and preventing them from carrying out a similar deed again.

    Another important aspect of these lectures is what the words "faith, love, and hope" mean to humankind for the next 5,000 years. These words, following St. Paul's letter to the Corinthians are usually placed in this order: faith, hope, and love. Steiner makes an excellent case for the proper order of these words, considering the destiny of humankind, to be: faith, love, and hope. Read all about it here:

    http://www.doyletics.com/arj/faithlov.htm

    3. John O'Donohue's Anam Cara — A Book of Celtic Wisdom

    Here is an amazing book by a Catholic theologian. My friend Len Daley recommended this book to me. Got time to live dangerously a little? Read this fine book.
    Excerpt from Review:

    "Speaking is an art — it breaks the silence — it destroys the sameness of the still air that it fills with vibrations. In this life we are but a song on a record, a cut on a CD, a single melody on the long-playing record of our immortal spirit." I wrote these words in the margins as I was reading the first pages of the Prologue. Any book that can inspire me so quickly, that can set my thoughts flying lyrically so early, belongs in a special place on my shelf, its words in a special place in my heart. On every page I found more inspiring words to set my thoughts into flight.

    4. Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One

    A funny and insightful look at Hollywood funeral practices by the Englishman, Evelyn Waugh (EVE - LYNN WHAW).
    Excerpt from Review:

    This book is full of "Loved Ones" — every day brings new Loved Ones to the hero, Dennis Barlow, and the heroine, Aim้e Thanatogenos. Each loved one gets tender loving care, whether it's a shampoo, a hair-do, a manicure and nail polish, a new smile, flesh-colored make-up, or twenty minutes to an hour and a half in the cremation oven. Dennis handles the cremations for his Loved Ones at the pet cemetery called the "Happier Hunting Grounds" which models itself after the ritzy human cemetery, "Whispering Glades," where Aim้e is the"cosmetician of the Orchid Room" who does the shampoos, hair-do's, manicures, nail polish, and flesh-colored make-up for her Loved Ones. If "Whispering Glades" sounds like Forest Lawn, one can only reflect thoughtfully on this prefatory "Warning" by Waugh, "This is a purely fanciful tale, a little nightmare produced by the unaccustomed high living of a brief visit to Hollywood."

    5. Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind

    This book contains a comprehensive exposition of Allan Bloom's views on education and expands on the view he expresses in his long introduction to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile or On Education. One need only read "Emile" to discover the truth of Bloom's statement that a reading of original texts allows one to form a vital understanding of issues that a reading of shallow rehashes of such texts does not. Bloom discusses in this book two types of Openness, how he proposes to re-invigorate college curriculum, and how his suggestion to use original texts [Great Books] is vilified by the Three great parts of the University today, Natural Sciences, Social Sciences and Humanities.

    A paradoxical aspect of Bloom's book is that he deals with two forms of openness and goes on to show how what is called openness in the first form actually amounts to a "closing of the mind". Here are two kinds of openness and the effects that Bloom says each has on students:

    I. Openness of indifference — humbling of intellectual pride; be whatever you want to be.
    II. Openness to the quest for knowledge and certitude — history and cultures as examples

    6. Annie Dillard's An American Childhood

    Here is a marvelous book about the childhood of what I consider to be the finest American writer of our time. Slide into her book and it will fit you like a glove.
    Excerpt from Review:

    [page 3] When everything else has gone from my brain — the President's name, the state capitals, the neighborhoods where I lived, and then my own name and what it was on earth I sought, and at length the faces of my friends, and finally the faces of my family — when all this has dissolved, what will be left, I believe, is topology: the dreaming memory of land as it lay this way and that.




    • New Stuff on the Internet:

    • CUPCAKES OF DOOM by RAY FRIESEN

      Here's a guy, Ray Friesen, who melds Pirates and Cooking into one funny comic book. Check out his website by Clicking Here or on Book Cover! Here's his blurb:

      Whoever has the biggest hat wins!
      It's showdown time, Our Heroic-ish Pirates versus Those Lousy Vikings to decide the fate of a kingdom! The weapon of choice? BAKED GOODS! Deliciously-Evil Viking Pie has taken over as the peoples' flavorite, leaving the home-made Pirate Cookies in the dust. Captain Scurvybeard, YoHo Joseph, Peglegless Pete, Lester, (and some other pirates with less goofy names) must embark on a quest to find the ultimate pastry: The Long Lost CUPCAKES OF DOOM!

      As you'd expect, there are sword fights aplenty, parrots, penguins, sea serpents, a treasure hunt or two, and all sorts of other piratey shenanigans. The whole thing gets a bit silly, just the way you like it. Giggling is Guaranteed (unless you’re a curmudgeon). YARG!

      ISBN 978-0-9802314-1-0



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    Movies we watched this past month:

    Notes about our movies: Many of the movies we watch are foreign movies with subtitles. After years of watching movies in foreign languages, Arabic, French, Swedish, German, British English, Russian, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Chinese, and many other languages, sometimes two or three languages in the same movie, the subtitles have disappeared for us. If the movie is dubbed in English we go for the subtitles instead because we enjoy the live action and sounds of the real voices so much more than the dubbed. If you wonder where we get all these foreign movies from, the answer is simple: NetFlix. For a fixed price a month they mail us DVD movies from our on-line Queue, we watch them, pop them into a pre-paid mailer, and the postman effectively replaces all our gas-consuming and time-consuming trips to Blockbuster. To sign up for NetFlix, simply go to http://www.netflix.com/ and start adding all your requests for movies into your personal queue. If you've seen some in these movie blurbs, simply copy the name, click open your queue, and paste the name in the Search box on NetFlix and Select Add. Buy some popcorn and you're ready to Go to the Movies, 21st Century Style. You get to see your movies as the Director created them — NOT-edited for TV, in full-screen width, your own choice of subtitles, and all of the original dialogue. Often you get the Director's Cut Edition which adds back excellent footage that was cut from the theater releases.
    P. S. Look for HD/DVD format movies which are now available from NetFlix.
    Hits (Watch as soon as you can. A Don't Miss Hit is one you might otherwise ignore.):
    “The Fall” (2006) A ‘Wizard of Oz’ journey of the imagination takes us on a fantastic voyage to spectacular sights in India, Africa, England, China, Fiji, and Argentina all from the hospital room in vintage Los Angeles of a bed-ridden stunt man and an eight-year-old girl with a broken arm and an inquisitive mind. This movie is an artistic tour-de-force, a feast for the eyes as well the heart from opening credits to the very end. A DON’T MISS HIT ! ! ! ! ! !
    “Amazing Grace” (2006, 2nd viewing) A man who wins battles gets a big parade, and doesn’t sleep well at night. A man of peace, like Wilberforce, when he wins, sleeps well, well he deserved it. Sing along with this one, you know the words. A DON’T MISS HIT !
    “Next” (2007) Destiny is what you have to do, no matter what else you want to do. Destiny is what’s next. If you can remember the future, you’ll say, “This will be incredible!” Then kiss.
    “27 Dresses” (2007) 27 dresses and 1 dream. Kevin Doyle arrives to rescue the eternal bridesmaid, replaces her hobby with a hubby.
    “Foyle’s War They Fought in the Fields”, Set3: Disk3 (2004) DCS Foyle is a little like Miss Pettigrew, helps people to grow, lets peccadillos slide, and jails the baddies. A fake parachute jump, one-murder-done, and one-to-go drives this rustic adventure with a new John Deere tractor, a pregnant farm girl, and a female tree hugger.

    “Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day” (2008) Francis McDormand is wonderful in this amazing movie as she changes people’s lives by her insights. Sexy and insightful, a rare combination for a movie. A DON’T MISS HIT !
    “Arranged” (2007) follows the life of two Brooklyn school-teachers, Rochel (Jewish) and Nasira (Muslim), and they fight off stereotypes from their pupils, principal, and worse of all their own families. Each must have an arranged marriage to make their parents happy, and how they arrange it makes a story.
    “Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont” (2005) Joan Plowright stars in this movie of an aged grandmother, Sarah, who moves into a London hotel, the Claremont, for an uncertain length of time. Her grandson Desmond doesn’t show after he calls and Ludovic arrives to replace him. Sarah and Ludo are changed by the friendship as are we. A DON’T MISS HIT !
    “Foyle’s War, A War of Nerves”, Set3: Disk4 (2004) Love, Bomb-defusing, Seditious activity, Black-marketeering, Bilking the government, and murder pervade this fun-filled episode.
    “What Happens in Vegas” (2008) may sometimes affect the rest of your life, like our two heros who marry wasted and repent without pleasure for six months. Once divorced their love for each other has a chance. Give this movie a chance to overcome its first half silliness. A DON’T MISS HIT !
    “Gathering Storm” (2002) “Here comes Winston” out of retirement to lead England against Germany. Close up and personal with Winne and Clemmie in the years before WWII.
    “An American Carol” (2008) A zany look at Michael Moore through the eyes of Charles Dickens, the Scrooge who stole the Fourth of July.
    “Foyle’s War, Bad Blood”, Set4: Disk2” (2006) Animals die, Sam gets sick, her friend dies from the same disease, hero is killed, and Foyle’s in the thick of it.
    “Memento” (2000) Our 2nd Viewing of this fine movie about a man who loses his short term memory. We follow him backwards in time, a few minutes at a time, until he loses his memory, then we move back to capture what events preceded immediately. A mind-bender bearing several viewing.
    “Little Dieter Needs to Fly” (1998) He watched a WWII fighter closely swipe his home in Germany and decided to become a pilot. Moving to America, he was a pilot and was shot down in Vietnam, escaping through the jungle after six months. An amazing story of courage and fortitude.
    “The Incredible Journey of Mary Bryant” (2005) You think you got problems, check out the journey of Mary Bryant, sent to prison colony of Botany Bay, she copes with prison life on the edge of a continent that is yet to be civilized. Think of the Mayflower full of murderers, thieves, and whores instead of Puritans. A DON’T MISS HIT !
    “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” (2008) is easier than forgetting this movie. I thought it was a slow movie up to the point of “What is this with the Dracula puppets?!” A Dracula musical is born within this movie created by Jason Segel who wrote the script and songs, played piano, sang, and starred in the movie. Watch all the extras after the Blu-Ray DVD and see how an audition helped shape the script and pump up the verve of this movie. A DON’T MISS HIT ! !
    Jean de Florette/Manon of the Spring (2 movie DVD) (1986) A tour-de-force by Yves Montad as the aged Cesar. Oedipus Rex comes to Provence with an ironic twist of fate. In a land where water is king whoever knows the source of the spring is king, or is he? A DON’T MISS HIT ! ! ! !

    “Under the Same Moon” (2007) Carlito smuggles himself across the border at El Paso heading to Los Angeles. This is his story — the 1200 mile trek of a nine-year-old boy hitch-hiking to meet his mother. A DON’T MISS HIT ! !
    “Foyle’s War, Bleak Midwinter”, Set4: Disk3” (2006) Paul is arrested for the death of his wife, an accident in a munitions factory, a bank vault robbery, and Foyle must connect the dots.
    “Fred Claus” (2007) played by Vince Vaughn as the brother of you know Ho Ho Who. A thrilling ride around the world alongside a substitute Santa with an inimitable knack for long-winded, tongue-twisting monologues. When this Santa Claus comes to town, you really better watch out!
    “Ninochtka” (1939) A fun look at the effects of the Russian revolution on its citizens, seen through the eyes and smiles of Greta Garbo who plays an official sent to Paris to sell confiscated jewels to fund the Bolshevik bureaucracy.
    "10 Items or Less" (2006) Morgan Freeman is researching a location for a movie and gets stuck in the "10 Items or Less" line. He sums up life this way: "Our part: we live, we work, we're just getting started." Fun, insightful romp with the Spanglish gal and Ms. Daisy's chauffer.
    “Ghost Town” (2008) Greg Kinnear is smarmy and the dentist is hilarious. Lots of belly laughs as the dentist dies twice and then learns to live and love. Slows a bit, but the ending is heart-rending.
    “Foyle’s War, Casualities of War”, Set4: Disk3” (2006) are: Sam get bombed for third time, a boy loses his speech, sabotege is rampant, hubby of researcher is shot, and Foyle quits.
    “Dreamer: Based on a True Story” (2005) 2nd Viewing. Kurt Russell as the father of a girl (Dakota Fanning) who looks like his wife, Goldie Hawn, as a child in a story of saving a horse to race another day.
    “Smile” (2004) A marvelous tale of two cities and a teenage girl in each, Los Angeles and rural China, and how the LA girl literally brings a smile to the face of the Chinese one. A DON’T MISS HIT! ! !
    “The Counterfeiters” (2007) Make no mistake, accept no substitutes, this movie is the real thing. Surviving real life in WWII concentration camp by making fake money.

    “Driving Lessons” (2006) Taciturn Ron Weasley (aka Rupert Grint) finally learns to drive while working for Julie Walters, a retired actress, and grows up in the process.
    “Foyle’s War, Plan of Attack”, Set5: Disk1” (2008) Suicides, Spies, Sweethearts, and Shots in the Dark brings Foyle out of retirement for the duration.

    Misses (Avoid At All Costs): We attempted to watch these this month, but didn't make it all the way through on most of them. Awhile back when three AAAC horrors hit us in one night, I decided to add a sub-category to "Avoid at All Costs", namely, A DVD STOMPER. These are movies so bad, you don't want anyone else to get stuck watching them, so you want to stomp on the disks. That way, if everyone else who gets burnt by the movie does the same, soon no copies of the awful movie will be extant and the world will be better off.

    “Quiet City” (2007) ZZZZ ZZZZZ - oh, huh? oh, stomp the DVD and let me go back to sleep ZZZZZZzzzz. A DVD STOMPER ! ! !
    “I Am Legend” (2007) All the world dies except for those in Vermont. A Hollywood Fantasy. Filled with ugly people and angry dogs.

    Your call on these — your taste in movies may differ, but I liked them:

    “Cheaper by the Dozen 2" (2005) was one too many. Zany, silly, and imminently forgettable.
    “The Dead Girl” (2006) Toni Collette and James Franco couldn’t bring the dead girl or this movie to life.
    “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” (2008) Two women and a city. Another woody Allen movie: steamy premise and woody dialogue saved only by beautiful women and architecture of Barcelona.


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    4. CAJUN STORY:
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    This one came from our friend, Carol Golden, in 2004.

    During a kindergarten session the Teacher asked each student to tell a story about somthing which they had done the day before. Boudreaux's son, Tee Paul, a pupil, got up and told the class that he'd found a cat but it was dead. "How did you know that the cat was dead?" Ms. Ordoyne asked the little boy.

    "Because Ah pissed in its ear and it didn't move," Tee Paul explained.

    "You did what?!" Ms. Ordoyne exclaimed in surprise.

    "Mais, you know,"explained the boy, "Ah leaned over and went 'Pssst!' in its ear, and it didn't move."

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    5. RECIPE of the MONTH for February, 2009 from Bobby Jeaux’s Kitchen:
    (click links to see photo of ingredients, preparation steps)
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    Potato Salad Sandwich

    Background on Potato Salad Sandwich: Since I was a child, I always loved potato salad the way my mother, Annette Matherne, made it for us. A nice balance of chopped green onions, potatoes, and yellow mustard with evaporated milk added to make it creamy. The potato chunks were small enough to allow it to be spread between two slices of bread. Locally we have a DiMartino's Deli which makes potato salad the way Annette made, plus they add boiled shrimp to it, making it delectable and unresistable. Whenever we have leftover shrimp potato salad, I usually make myself a sandwich with it the next day. This time I added Blue Plate mayonnaise and Zatarain's Creole mustard, and a slice of Creole tomatos from my fall garden and it was a big hit with me and Bobby Jeaux, in whose Kitchen, I made this delicacy. There are many variations to try on this sandwich, so be ready with the basic ingredients when some delicious potato salad shows up. [Note: this won't work for the usual bland potato salads you find at covered dish events.]

    Ingredients
    DiMartino's potato [or acceptable substitute]
    Blue Plate Mayonnaise [or acceptable substitute]
    Orowheat Fork-split English Muffin [Avoid pre-sliced] Ripe avocado [optional] Creole tomato [optional]

    Preparation
    Toast English Muffin till brown [setting on Toaster much higher than for bread] Slice Tomato [if used] Slice Avocado [if used]

    Cooking Instructions
    Cover both slices with mayo [adds juiciness to sandwich] Layer avocado, tomato if used Add thick layer of potato salad. Bring slices together and eat.

    Serving Suggestion
    Serve with sticks of carrots, celery, radish slices, etc, as garnish.

    Other options
    Add Avocado Half, sliced, to sandwich.
    Add Zatarain's Creole Mustard with Avocado slices
    Replace English Muffin with Toasted Good Hearth Stone Ground bread [use Stone Ground whole wheat breadwhenever possible, this one is the best]



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    6. POEM by BOBBY from The Missing Moment, "Death Not Interesting":
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    I first wrote this poem April 21, 2003 on the rear overleaf of The Missing Moment by Robert Pollack, a distinguished molecular biologist. It was inspired by these words of his on page 9:
    I soon found that science had no useful model for dealing with mortality nor any apparent interest in developing one: death was simply not interesting.
    Pollack tells us, in effect, "Life is a death sentence." That is blunt enough, and we can agree with that. But to go as far as to say that "according to all scientific evidence, death is final" is to equate life with material existence, which is to presume that science, which prides itself on only giving credence to the material world of sensory data, can have any credence when it pronounces the non-existence of a non-material or spiritual world. Such a pronouncement can only be called hubris in the extreme because the lack of evidence is not evidence! Read my review of The Missing Momentfor further exposition on this theme.

    Here is the poem which resulted — think of it as a song to be sung a capella by a molecular biologist backed up by a Greek chorus singing doo-wop.

    Death Not Interesting

    Death is not interesting to science, they say
    At least not in a religious way.

    Scientists are going to die some day
    And they’re not interested in death, they say
    At least not in a religious way.

    “To die, to sleep, perchance to dream”
    was what death to Hamlet seemed.
    “To be, or not to be — that is the question”
    which Science has not esteemed.

    Death is not interesting to science, they say
    At least not in a religious way.

    The Big Bang’s popped into the Halls of Science
    DNA tests have proved their reliance
    Scientists come, scientists go away

    But . . .

    Death is not interesting to science, they say
    At least not in a religious way.

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    7. REVIEWS and ARTICLES for February:
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    And for my Good Readers, here’s the new reviews and articles for this month. The ARJ2 ones are new additions to the top of A Reader’s Journal, Volume 2, Chronological List, and the ART ones to A Reader’s Treasury.

    1.) ARJ2: The SPIZZNET File — An Adventure in Inter-species Communication by Bobby Matherne

    First things first: why is this man reviewing his own novel? And why did he take so long, some nine years to get around to it? As the author, let me say that after having read and re-read my novel for some 17 times back in the year 2000,I couldn't bear to read it again for a long time. As the reviewer, if I haven't read a book in that long a time, I need to re-read it in order to review it the way I like to review books, which is to study it in detail and share with my readers my understanding of what the author is saying, quoting examples from the text which illustrate his points and my points best. George Bernard Shaw famously said, "I often quote myself; it adds sparkle to my conversation." Who best to copy than GBS?

    Recently a woman asked Bobby what his relationship with books was, and I heard him reply, "I like to roll around the floor with them." This was in fact how he began reading books. A neighbor lady whose father owned the Auto Repair place across the street gave him a box of Children's Classics and he read them on the floor of the bedroom each afternoon while his three younger brothers with whom he shared the bedroom were outside playing. As soon as the first library in Westwego opened, he became its most frequent borrower, always taking out the maximum of five books at one time. The librarian never refused him a book, except one time she came close, but relented after he answered her questions.

    [page 21] Once she almost did, asking him questions about why he wanted this book. "It's just about the adventures of this little guy named Spiro," he said. The drawings of Spiro's journey from the surface of the skin, through the blood stream, into the eyeballs and all over the body fascinated him, and he read it repeatedly. Only years later did he discover that it was the story of the progress of a syphilis infection in the human body. At the age of fifty he met his librarian at a new library dedication. She still remembered him. "I always wondered if you really read all those books or just left them up on the icebox," she told him.

    This librarian was Edith Lawson, whose name now graces the large modern library located only a half block from his long-time childhood home in Westwego. Thanks to her indulgence, he had been able to read all of the Doctor Doolittle books, over thirty of them, in the small town library as a boy. He wondered a lot about how man might communicate with animals over the years. While he was at Louisiana State University, he encountered the story of "Clever John", the German horse who had become an international celebrity, until that fateful day on which an even smarter doctor had discovered it was just a trick by which the horse was revealing what someone in his audience already knew.

    Are you the novelist of your own life or is someone in your past or present writing the script for you, up until now? Is it scary to take up the pen yourself, right now, and change your dress, your address, your work, your life? Let that scare be recognized as excitement and use that energy to move you in the direction of your new script, one written by your self, for yourself.

    Shed the past as a blue crab does its cramped shell, and move out into the water as a soft-shell crab, finding shelter in underwater vegetation while your new shell hardens into shape. This is what Mornay did on the marina that day.

    [page 52] He had not dreamt of dolphins at all since he had met Ingrid and now they had entered his waking dreams. His journey into the realm of feelings with Ingrid was akin to his becoming a dolphin and diving into the ocean. So long in the dry air of thought, where subject-object science exists, he had finally plunged into the warm fluidity of the watery kingdom of feelings. And there, he was discovering, was where the dolphins live. His first discovery of feelings with Ingrid had surfaced into his consciousness, but the other developing feeling relationship with dolphins would not surface for several years yet.

    Did you know that dolphins are polite? It was one of the things the author discovered as he read through dolphin lore in his research for this novel. When asked why spizualization (dolphin speak/see) will be harder to accomplish by humans than phizualization (dolphin hear/see) Mornay explains how the so-called politeness of dolphins is really a necessary process for their communication with each other.

    My favorite story in the book is the one about Alfie the dog who is bitten by a snake and dies, and then later appears in Mornay's dream to teach him how the processes of phobic response and grief are inversions of each other (Chapter 5, The Discovery, Pages 82 to 85). If you use the grief process to deal with a phobia, the phobia goes away; if you use the phobia process to deal with grief, the grief goes away. This was an insight that the author received from the NLP pioneers Richard Bandler and John Grinder when they were first getting started in their ground-breaking field of psychotherapy. To grieve, one must image the loved one in a scene with oneself as if it were projected on a movie screen, that is, in a completely dissociated state. No matter how good the scene you're replaying, you will feel bad about not being with the loved one. To have a phobic response, one must image the fearful scene as if you are playing a role in the movie, in a completely associated state. If you remember the fearful scene like a grieving person does, in a dissociated state, the phobic response will not arise. Police who say to rape victims, "Tell us what happened to you." will likely cause them to recall the event in an associated state and be terrified. People who learn how to recall a loved one in an associated state will be comforted by feeling the loved one next to them again and the grief response will go away.

    The Temple to Apollo is located at Delphi which is named after the dolphins whose species name is Delphinoidea. The author gives us an imaginative explanation of the connection between Apollo (aka Phoebus), Pythia, and a dolphin named Alexikakos when the Dolphin People speak at the end of Chapter 6, pages 92 to 94. Here is the last two paragraphs:

    [page 94] Pythia was the most famous of the Delphic mediums and held her position well into her later years. Here are some views of Pythia taking questions from a petitioner, receiving answers from Alexikakos, and relaying the answers from the oracle. Through her accurate predictions, the fame of the Delphi Oracle spread throughout the Hellenic region and smaller oracles were established on some of the smaller islands.
          The name Phoebus meant "bright" and "pure" in ancient Greek. The legend of Apollo grew and he soon became deified as a sun god. The many myths centering on Apollo can be understood today as an attempt by early man to explain in metaphor the quantum leap of consciousness that carried the Human People into discovering the existence and usefulness of feelings.

    When this novel was written the idea of moving logos was far-fetched, but that technology is here thanks to broad-band connections. The author imagined the dolphins as identifying themselves to each other by speaking moving images which represented their identity.

    [page 102] Suddenly Charlie squealed with delight as on the video monitor Nimrod disappeared and was replaced by the image of a human hunter with a bow and arrow. It seemed quite strange to Margaret, but not to Charlie.
          "Here Nimrod introduces himself to us as the 'Hunter,' which is what 'Nimrod' means in Hebrew. It is a very old name, first encountered in the bible as the name of Noah's grandson. Now watch as Demeter introduces herself."
          The smaller of the two dolphins swam over and magically transformed herself into a beautiful woman walking through a field of waving, golden wheat.
          "Demeter was the Greek goddess of grain, of cereals. Dolphins use pictorial names, somewhat like our American Indians with names like Dancing Bear, or Flying Eagle, except dolphins can speak the moving pictures that are their given names. They also have a remarkable knowledge of Greek mythology for some reason we have yet to discover. Nimrod was named after the grandson of Noah of the Bible, and he has already told us some stories that date from biblical times. His name means Great Hunter and he seems to be one, from the stories of his exploits we have seen so far."

    Singers learn songs by listening to them and repeating the sounds they hear. Dolphins learn to speak the same way by mimicking the sounds they hear and repeating them, only the sounds they hear contain pictures. The author imagined Robert and Ingrid in a romantic setting alongside the Grand Canyon at night as they together discovered how dolphins see by repeating the sounds they hear.

    [page 106] "While driving Ingrid and the kids to Las Vegas, I was reading Paul Watzlawick's book How Real Is Real? I was taken aback by what he said about dolphin speech, 'To make them audible to the human ear, these signals would have to be brought down to a frequency within the human range.' Even if we did this, the slowdown in time would put the human observers hopelessly behind within seconds, making a conversation impossible. There had to be something intrinsically wrong with this approach."
          "Sounds like time for a new paradigm."
          "Exactly! But what new paradigm, I didn't know yet. One night as Ingrid and I sat by the side of the Grand Canyon, I explained to her how dolphins see their surroundings by creating pictures from the sounds reflected from them. She's an excellent singer, and, I suppose, that's what inspired her to make the suggestion that if dolphins can hear pictures, then maybe they can speak pictures."

          "Astounding! Robert, that's the new paradigm! Right?" Richard was excited now. "Yes, yes, . . . dolphins communicate using pictures, pictures created by sounds, both input and output. That solves the slowdown problem you mentioned earlier. That opens the possibility of real-time conversations with dolphins if we can learn to speak and hear pictures in the same way they do."
          "Right. I had realized that the attempts to slow down wide bandwidth dolphin audio to narrow bandwidth human audio were as foolish as for extra-terrestrial beings to attempt to make sense of our television signals by slowing them down into radio signals. What they would need to recognize is that the nature of television is visual pictures, not sounds, and then to create a device to make television signals intelligible in real time as pictures. Which is what we do every day using a television set."

    If humans are able to communicate with dolphins, will the creatures become just another wild animal that we have domesticated? Mornay didn't think so.

    [page 119] "I don't think of it that way. Man is the fiercest creature on the earth, responsible for more deaths of animals and men than any other species. To learn to cooperate as equals with a creature of the wild will be a humbling experience, and may lead to a world in which man makes peace with all God's creatures. When that day comes, man will have domesticated the wildest animal of all, man himself."

    Recently the author told me he was taking a course from Professor Jeanette Norden of the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and when taking about the eye she showed the image of a dog in front of an eye and the inverted dog back on the retina. This is kindergarten stuff compared to the author's analysis in Chapter 10 of what constitutes seeing after the upside-down image reaches the retina. He describes three essential processes necessary for seeing in the human and shows how those processes must be accomplished by computerized equipment to communicate with dolphins. There must be a process of construction of visual images in the brain, a training process, and a process of aligning images with the real world (mostly at under the age of one year old).

    The author has done the world a big favor by delineating and describing these three otherwise unconscious processes involved with seeing. The process of construction of visual images in the brain which are projected outward on the world is rarely recognized, even by medical experts such as Norden.

    Without the training process which one must do in order to construct those visual images for projection, one can only see blotches of color as Virgil did when his sight was restored at age 40 in the Oliver Sacks' story "To See and Not See." That training process is best done before the age of five while doylic memory is still being created so that the skills are stored as unconscious processes. Virgil's severe difficulties arose because he had to learn consciously how to train his eyes to see and this learning turned him from a functional blind man into a non-functional seeing man. And last, the alignment process must be done which requires that one have redundant signals about the position of objects in the world: being able to manipulate the objects, receiving and interpreting gravity signals with a working vestibular system, etc. In Chapter One of The Brain that Changes Itself by Norman Doidge, he describes a woman who has lost 99% of her vestibular function and the world looks and feels like it's made of a vibrating jelly; it has no solidity to her. These are three vital aspects of the process of seeing which the author of the Spizznet File highlights in his book. This book is also about human seeing as well as dolphin seeing, rightly understood.

    Human beings also spizualize, but not as efficiently as our dolphin friends, because we must use artifacts in order create visual representations of our thoughts: photographs, drawings, models, prototypes, and hand gestures. During the process of talking, hand gestures and bodily motions are the typical methods employed by a human speaker. I have worked alongside people in a nuclear power plant and observed them describing to me the location to place a warning tag on a complex valve system that they are familiar with.

    By the time they finished talking, they had built by combinations words and hand gestures, a 3-D representation of the valve mechanism which existed in a radiation hazard area and showed me exactly where to place the tag on that complicated structure in as short a time as possible. Dolphins would have simply spizzed their recollection of that valve and pointed to the position; humans, unable to speak visual images, need to use other means to create that image. The ability to make 3-D walk-through's of proposed architectural renditions has arrived and these are examples of humans doing through artifacts (computers) what dolphins can do naturally.

    Another favorite part for me was the answer the dolphins give for why they beach themselves to die. It has always puzzled me why dolphins and whales return to the beach after human volunteers have labored to move them safely out to the sea. Animals like to go off into hidden places when they are sick and dying. We saw that a year ago with Steiner our Schnauzer. The best thing to do is leave these animals alone, as they are healing their bodies. Three days or so later, Steiner returned to his normal sleeping spot in the utility room and his tail was wagging in joy once again. Perhaps this is also the best thing to do for dolphins who beach themselves. To help them back into the deep water is equivalent, in my mind, to projecting our human weaknesses upon the dolphins. Yes, humans might get into a tight bind and be unable to extract themselves without external help, but a dolphin get stuck in the shallows? That simply inane to presume that would happen. Plus, it happens with groups of dolphins and whales at the same time.

    Since they clearly communicate with each other, they would have already warned of the danger of shallow water to the others, so why would they approach and endanger themselves unless they wanted to do it? This will surely be one of the first questions when the technology for inter-species communication with the cetaceans is operational. The author simply gives us a look at his guess of what they might say.

    This book is a spizualization of the author's imaginations about how the first and possibly only chance for inter-species communication will take place. Between the covers of this book, one can find the ideas and specifications for how one can go about building devices for seeing what dolphins speak to each other and then creating a way for speaking back to the dolphins. Let us say Hooray! to the author for dispelling the foolish notion that one must try to interpret the dolphins speaking of TV images by slowing them down into radio signals. If they speak TV, let us learn to receive those images and learn to speak their language back. In the ten years since this book was conceived and written, the technology for ultrasound image production has improved dramatically. Surely an innovative researcher can build off of the medical technology and design an interface to receive and convert the dolphins speech into images. When that day comes, a little boy in a small house in Westwego reading Dr. Doolittle will look up from the floor of his bedroom and give us a great big smile.

    Read the FULL REVIEW at:
    http://www.doyletics.com/arj/spizznet.htm

    2.) ARJ2: Inner Reading and Inner Hearing, GA#156 — Achieving Being in the World of Ideas by Rudolf Steiner

    Trained as a physicist, I have certain expectations about what constitutes science, and the repeatability of experiments is an essential aspect. And yet, such repeatability is not found in spiritual science. Why? For one thing the position of the experiment and the world are interchanged. In physics, the human being is the experimenter and the world is subjected to the experiment. In spiritual science, an inversion occurs whereby beings of the spiritual world play the experimenter and we humans are the subjects of the experiment, no matter whether we initiated the experiment or not. Consider how we train our pets, each morning we give our dog a treat to start the day and he excitedly awaits his treat. After awhile, it seems equally true that our dog has trained us to give him a treat each morning, as if he were running an experiment on us, his masters, and could now claim his experiment to be a success, as it is definitely repeatable. Yet, the experiment is only repeatable because we, his masters, wish to feed him the treat for his benefit. If humans try to do experiments with the spiritual world, it is as if they are taking the place of the dog who is trying to achieve a predictable response from his master. To whatever extent humans are successful, it will be because something in the humans' karma will have aligned with the spiritual world to produce the success, which might not have been achieved any other way. But few materialistic experimenters would be sensitive enough to their own karma to be successful; instead, they would attempt to create something dramatic and unpredictable as proof that the success was totally unexpected and due solely to their experiment.

    Steiner prepares us for inner reading and hearing by pointing how we think, feel, and will in relation to the physical world and how those activities are useful for our penetration of the spiritual world. He explains that the content of what we learn from the exterior world is useless to us, but the process by which we learn is essential preparation for us to learn about the spiritual world. Scientists who are trained to use their own processes in uncovering the content of the world will likely miss this crucial distinction, up until now.

    In this next metaphor of a botanist, Steiner clearly spells out that he is talking about a process by which we train ourselves to become a spiritual researcher.

    [page 8, 9] If I am active as a botanist and make amazing efforts decade after decade in the field of botany, that is a fine thing on the physical plane. However, all this effort has a secondary effect: I become agile in thinking; my thinking becomes, so to speak, trained. Spiritual researchers must enter into the training and use what is used in ordinary life in the service of external knowledge to make the intellectual powers more agile, more supple. For when, instead of applying these powers to usefulness and advantage in the physical world, we use them in the service of self-education, as happens in meditation, concentration, and the exercises received, then we are preparing ourselves to penetrate into the spiritual world. . . . We can only prepare ourselves, so that when the things of the spiritual world approach us they do not escape our notice, but rather really make an impression on us.

    It is as if we wished to experience Rome directly and we prepare ourselves to the point that Rome visits us. All we can do is prepare and wait in readiness for it to arrive. This may seem silly to those of you halfway around the world from Rome, but in the spiritual world, there is no need to travel to arrive where you wish to go: it is everywhere around where you are, right now, today, this minute as I type these words and you read them. Why do we not see the spiritual world? Well, as Steiner explains, we do, but our consciousness is too dim to receive it, up until now.

    [page 10] We continually go straight through the spiritual world and do not see it; we are inattentive to the spiritual world because our constitution is not prepared for it. Moreover, if we have the opportunity to penetrate that world, as is the case at night in sleep, then our consciousness proves too weak, too dull, to perceive the spiritual beings around us.

    In "Riddles of Philosophy" Steiner said that "Nature and spirit are not two different entities, but one and the same being in two different forms," and then quoted Schelling as saying: "Nature is to be the visible spirit; spirit the invisible nature." It is a delusion to believe we exist only within our skin. Our physical body is but a mirror which reflects the physical world around us, but with our soul and spirit we exist outside the body and within the objects we observe around us.

    Here is the theme of this book which we must come to grips with in our reading of this book if we are to develop a balanced relationship with the spiritual world.

    [page 14] One who does not pay attention to what I have just said come to an entirely unbalanced relation to the spiritual word. There it is a matter of learning to interpret and read what one perceives. we shall learn in the following lecture how this interpretation and reading is meant.
           Now I can say that I have clarified, at least in an introductory manner, the preliminary concept of esoteric reading [RJM: inner reading]. It occurs when we experience ourselves in the astral body as we otherwise do in the "I" in the physical world, so that the experiences of the astral body are reflected in the etheric body, rather than the experiences of the ego in the physical body.

    In the song, "Old Man River", we hear the Mississippi River spoken of as a man. What is old about him? What is man-like about the river? Only the spirit that lives within it. Our own human body is like a river in that the very molecules that make up our physical body today are only temporary residents, like the molecules of water in a river. In about seven years, those molecules today will have all flown away from our body, replaced by new ones — as humans we are simply that which endures as these molecules flow out of and into our body.

    Do our brains create our thoughts and soul experiences? Artificial intelligence researchers claim this to be so, and they plan to create brains better than our own brain. What they miss is the essence of the matter: our brain no more produces our soul experience than a mirror produces the things we see in the mirror.

    [page 18] Therefore our organism is in truth a mirroring device, and what we experience is not produced in us by our physical organism — an erroneous idea of materialism — but is reflected. Our organism no more produces what we experience in our souls about things than a mirror produces what we see in the mirror. Materialists who assert that the brain or another organ produces our soul experiences are saying the same thing as those who would assert that the image they use of their own face in the mirror does not belong to them, but is instead produced by the mirror.

    In the 1970s I studied several forms of dream therapy including Senoi dream work and Gestalt dream work. On a couple of pages, Steiner sketches out two ways of working with dreams which mirror both the technique innovated by the Malaya-Senoi people and the curmudgeon Fritz Perls. The Senoi people shared their dreams in their communal hut each morning. If a child had a scary dream of a tiger, they would have the child relive the dream, but at the point the tiger would appear, the child would be encourage to make friends with the tiger, complimenting it of being large and fierce and asking of it a token of its esteem.

    [page 22] Let us suppose, for example, that the [dream] image is there and that you have successfully distinguished yourself from the image. then suppose that certain personality who looks disagreeable, unfriendly, appears in the world of images. Try to capture the feeling of how it would be if you were really nice to this personality, so that it would look at you in a friendlier way after giving you such a dirty look. If you succeed in consciously altering something in the world of images, then you have an easier time establishing your position in relation to that world.

    Fritz Perls taught people to interpret every component of a dream as a part of their own self. If you are driving a car and some one is skating in front of you slowing you down, you are both the driver of the car and the skater. If you then encounter a woman whose pickup truck is broken down, you are both the truck and the woman seeking help.

    [page 22, 23] If, for example, one person fights or wounds another, you experience yourself as the inflictor of the wound and also as the soul that is wounded or attacked. You are everything in these images. You are utterly within them. If you had an image in front of you in which a beheading is depicted you experience yourself at the same time as the person who is beheaded and the person who does the beheading. That is how you experience yourself within this very fluctuating world of images. You yourself are every image and every movement in it.

    This next passage illuminates the reality behind the metaphor of the Cave that Plato made famous. We humans are like people bound in chains inside a cave, on the back of which the shadows of objects and people passing by are projected. Seeing nothing but these shadows, we take them as reality, having no idea that they are but shadow images of the colorful, vibrant life taking place outside the cave, if we could only see it. But we are chained to the physical sides of the cave, chained to the physical world of Earth, the tie which binds us to our home.

    [page 35] But we learn something else as well. I have already alluded to it once in a series of lectures held in Munich, but from another point of view. We learn to pose from then on, in deepest seriousness, a vital question of spiritual science. We learn to ask: How is it really with us human beings since we still fundamentally live constantly in a fluctuating web of spiritual entities that we cannot bring into our physical bodies without bringing in the seed of death? Outside, we are always surrounded by imaginations, we are right in the middle of a sphere of imaginations-but they must not come inside us. What then comes into us from these imaginations? Shadowy images, reflections, mirror images, as our thought, as our ideas. On the outside are the full-blooded, real imaginations. They reflect themselves in us; we experience them in the diluted, shadowy form of our thoughts and ideas. If we were to bring them into us in their full-bloodedness instead of merely bringing them to reflection, we would stand in every moment before the danger of death.
           What is really going on in this? Nothing less is going on than that we are protected by the world order from experiencing the spiritual entities and processes surrounding us in their full-blooded state. We are protected because in our ordinary, everyday consciousness only shadows of these full-blooded spiritual entities touch us. And yet, a great many of these imaginations belong to us, belong to the powers that are creatively active in us. In this world of imaginations the creative forces live in us. We may not experience them in their original form, but only in the shadowy form in which they are in us as thoughts.

    When we learned to read, we quickly learned our vowels and consonants. The consonants are like fixed positions, sounds clipped and stopped in a precise way. Vowels are more fluidic — we do not stop them, they flow easily from one vowel sound to another, as in the Old MacDonald nursery rhyme, "E, i, e, i, o." When Steiner reveals there are 7 vowels and 12 consonants in the spiritual world, we notice the similarity of vowels to the seven planets and consonants to the 12 positions in the zodiac of astrology. The constellation of stars in the zodiac are fixed, but the planets move around seemingly at will, in fact, they were originally called "roving stars" by the ancients. In Chapter 3, Steiner discusses three of the vowels of the spiritual world.

    In my essay The Childhood of Humanity, I strive to express a truth about our early childhood, a truth that will be difficult for many people to accept because few, if any, can remember much of their childhood before five years old, and as one goes further back, one's memories become less frequent and very dim, fading away completely below the age of three for most. During the time before three, I hypothesize that children have clairvoyant skills because they have not yet developed their coarse powers of perception and thus they are yet able to perceive the "subtle weaving beings and formations" (Page 36) that fill the spiritual world around. Angels, imaginary friends, fairies, elves, and many other spiritual perceptions are still possible for them, but parents who have long ago lost this ability, discount such reports from their children, up until now. Is there a way for parents to live again, even for a brief time, in this halcyon time? There is one way which I have stumbled across and would like to share it with you. If this is so, then it is a way for us to contact angelic and higher beings, to allow them to feed memories to us of this time. The process I will share with you will be a conscious one, except that you will not be conscious of the appearance of the angelic beings until after the fact when they will have fed up to you some long-lost memory. In this book, Steiner describes a similar process.

    This experience happened to me about a week ago. I was having a bad day and had a constant frown on my forehead. "Did I have such a day in my childhood, before I was five?" I wondered about that, and immediately the answer came to me, "Do a speed trace." A speed trace is a way I have of asking my body, "Is this a doyle?" A doyle is a doylic memory present in my body as a physical body, such as a frown which originally happened before I was five and was then pestering me due to the external events of my bad day triggering the doylic memory of a previous bad day. I didn't know all this was true about the frown, but a speed trace is a way of asking my body if it were true. So I did the speed trace. Directly upon going from 1 year old to 6 months old, the frown went away, and a thought materialized in my mind that the first bad day was when I was weaned from my mother's breast milk to bottled milk, from a live human nipple to an artificial rubber nipple. This image came to me, as I understand it now, as a reflection from my etheric body (which holds all memories indefinitely) to my astral body, and an angelic being then shared the memory with me. Naturally I was not conscious of the reflection of memory from my etheric body to my astral body nor of the intervention of the angelic being in handing the memory to me — the memory just appeared in my consciousness. One consequence of asking the question of my body using the speed trace will be that my body will no longer re-experience the frown when I have some bad day.

    This process of having an angelic being produce a memory and hand it to you is what Steiner refers to as Vowel No. 1.

    [page 40] You may have the feeling that the world surrounds you, but you cannot live in this world with your feeble human powers. You feel that what surrounds you while you live in your human body can only be perceived in the shadowy forms of your thoughts and ideas; or, better said, they reflect themselves from inside you. You may also come to feel that you cannot experience these imaginations directly; your protecting angelic being in ordinary life must reduce it. And when you feel all of this inwardly with the necessary tone of inner piety, then you have the ability to perceive one of the vowels of the spiritual world.

    We have the power to transform ourselves and if we do so morally, it brings us a feeling of religious piety and deep humility. What would a fidelity to natural obligations of the spiritual world entail but acting morally in all thoughts and deeds? But how do we determine whether a thought or deed is moral? The answer to this question is as elusive as the question of what is freedom, and curiously the answer to both can be found together thanks to the innovative concepts promulgated by Dr. Andrew Joseph Galambos around the middle of the twentieth century. He developed a unique definition of freedom, the first and only operational definition of freedom, so far as I know. As a physicist, he used operational definitions all the time because they specified the operations necessary to determine whether some thing was covered by them. The definition of mass and weight specify what one must do to distinguish between the two — it is one of the first crucial distinctions one learns to make as a physicist, and nothing previously experienced prepared one for this distinction which involves separate physical units of mass and weight. Weight we discover only exists in the presence of gravity; mass exists even when there is no gravity.

    Here is the definition of freedom by Galambos, "Freedom is the societal condition which exists when everyone has complete control of one's property." Now, this definition will immediately sound materialistic and turn off many people, until they come to understand the definition of property, "Property is one's life and all non-procreative derivatives of one's life." What are the derivatives of one's life? One's thoughts and ideas, and the other things which one acquires as the result of one's thoughts and ideas. For simplicity's sake, Galambos gave names to each kind of property, 1. Primordial property (one's life), 2. Primary property (one's thoughts and ideas) and 3. Secondary property (all the things acquired by one's thoughts and ideas). There is an entire course, V50, built to describe these definitions and their far-reaching implications,(4) one of which is the ability to determine whether a deed is moral. One need only ask this question, "Whose property does the deed involve?" Remember that we live in a society which has many controls over secondary property and few if any controls over primary property. Thus, most everyone understands the morality of the use of secondary property, but few people understand the morality of the use of primary property!

    When have you ever proposed some project and had someone object by saying, "Whose idea was that originally?" In America, there seems to be a wide-spread delusion that ideas are free for the taking. After hearing someone at a nearby table discuss an idea, the average Americans feel as though it has become theirs to use as they see fit.

    Look at how we create immoral acts by violating each kind of property:

    Primal property Killing, enslaving, any form of coercion

    Primary property Use of other people's thoughts and ideas without permission (plagiarism, intellectual property theft, etc)

    Secondary property Use of other people's things without permission (theft, vandalism, etc)

    It may not be immediately clear to those seeing these definitions of property for the first time how important Primary property is, but innovative people who have innovated products for a company and had the ideas taken away by the company will explain to you the injustice done to them. If a company saw fit to lord their will over an employee in an unjustified way, in a way in which the Primary property of its employee was interfered with, it has used powers of transformation to harm its employee. The power of transformation is Vowel No. 2.

    [page 45] It does happen on the physical plane that we use the powers that are otherwise powers of transformation. We use that power, without knowing anything about it, every time we do our fellow human beings the injustice of making our own will lord over theirs in an unjustified way. It begins already when we tell lies to others. Through this we attach a wrong to them. One wins a certain power over them, because the lies continue to work within them.

    Clearly, Steiner understood in general terms how the process of injustice works, and the operational definitions of Galambos allows us to decipher when an injustice is being done in specific cases. Rudolf Steiner's idea for a Threefold Society can be achieved by the general acceptance of the definitions of freedom and property because any coercive interference between the three branches of society would be a clear violation of one or more areas of property.

    One aspect of injustice we do to one another that I pondered a lot was that of lies, the telling of untruths. How can telling a lie or untruth be a violation of property? Let us ask, "Whose property is it?" and see where that leads us. When one tells a lie, whose idea was it to lie? A lie does not exist in the world, only truth exists. Clearly animals cannot lie. They live in the world, but cannot lie, isn't that so? But how came it about that humans can lie? The Fall. The precocious gift of Lucifer to humankind produced the ability for us to lie and the temptation to do so. Thus, rightly understood, every time we tell a lie, that lie came to us from the Devil or Satan and we offer to another human being as if it were from us, as if it were God's gift to them, instead of from the Evil One. With a lie we give others some idea or thought which will do them some injustice, thereby causing them harm. And since the idea for the lie came from the Devil/Satan, we can truthfully say later when confronted by our lie, "That wasn't my idea!"

    In 1979 I was awaiting the start of a lecture on the Tao of Physics by its author when a gal sat down next to me and began talking non-stop. What she said was so interesting that I took some notes. She was telling about all the words she discovered which when spelled backwards meant the opposite of what they mean spelled forward. The one I recall vividly was LIVE and EVIL or LIVED and DEVIL. These words have come back to me many times over the past three decades, especially when I first encountered this idea from Rudolf Steiner, "Evil is a good out of its time." It's as though LIVE is a good in its time and its inverse EVIL is a good out of its time. Live is what humans do morally and Evil is what we receive as temptations from the Devil/Satan to do, which would be a good in its proper time, but we are fed a lie about this deed, lie which lead us to do evil instead of good. The secret of evil is Vowel 3.

    To summarize the three vowels of the spiritual world: Vowel 1 is the ability of angelic beings to convert and hand over to you long-forgotten memories from your etheric body. The other two vowels are summarized in the passage below:

    [page 46] The same is also true when we do something bad. The powers with which we do something bad are in fact the powers of transformation, only applied in the wrong place. Everything bad in the world is the unlawful application of these powers of transformation. We can make deep insights into the secret of existence when we know where the injustice, evil, crime, and destruction that happen in the world come from. They happen when one applies the best, most holy powers that exist, the powers of transformation, in a wrong way. There would be no evil in the world if there were no transformative powers. Once in a public lecture I even alluded to this peculiarity, that evil is a wrong application of powers that, used in the proper place, would lead to the highest good. A certain mood is present in our soul when we know it contains something that on the one hand can transform itself into all people and beings, and on the other hand can transform itself into egotism. We must be able to hold this mood up to the cosmos if we wish to hear in a spiritual sense. That is a second vowel.
          The mood we can have in relation to the secret of evil as I have presented it is the third vowel — what we experience when we know how a person can become evil. If we know this secret, that there are very lofty powers that can be used in a wrong way, then we have the mood of a third cosmic vowel. We must experience these moods, for that is the heart of the matter.

    In discussing the human body's formation in Chapter 7, Steiner explains something that will sound very familiar to us: that genii and other spirits do not have legs because they did not undergo development upon the Earth. I have drawn a rough sketch to remind you of Aladdin's Genie which arises from his Lamp without any legs. Recently while visiting a Greek Orthodox church, I noted the two stained glass windows, one containing image of the Cherabim and the other of the Seraphim — they had a human face but their lower body tapered to a point, no legs. In representations of angels, usually the flowing garment seems to hide the legs and feet, both of which are in real angels not there.

    [page 116] If we consider other genii, other spirits, we cannot make them with human legs. To give legs to spirits that do not belong to earthly existence is simply wrong, as we can really understand from spiritual-scientific knowledge.

    We live in a world we can call maya, a world of images, reflections of reflections, like a maze of mirrors in the amusement park. How do we achieve then a world of reality from these reflections?

    [page 127,128] But when it is a matter of creating realities ourselves, it is actually correct that we live in a world of images; for although the images have no reality, we can bestow reality upon them. Do we actually do that?
          Yes, we do that; in one area of our life we do that. We do that when we act morally. The moment moral impulses make their way through our soul life, we create something and put it into the world — something that would not be there without us. When we form a concept of the world, we have only images; when we act morally, we put realities into the world. We would never arrive at the point of living morally in a world that came to meet us as already self-sufficiently real. For in that case we would, in respect to what we wanted to do morally, run up against the world everywhere.
          Consider the animals. Animals experience the world entirely differently than people. They do not experience it as a world of images, but rather as a world of true realities. For that reason, animals cannot develop morals. Human beings can develop morals because they can themselves introduce moral impulses into the world; a world which is otherwise only one of reflections. What human beings make flow into the world as moral impulses, flows into the world as a reality coming out from them into the world. The gods have set us out on the physical plane and turned our spiritual experience into a world of unreality, so that we arrive at the position of introducing moral impulses into unreality as reality. There you have creation ex nihilo, creation out of nothing through ideas, which are in fact only images, only unrealities.

    No reasonable person can read the above and still claim that human beings are just another species of animal, can they? Animals cannot create something from ideas; at best, the highest apes can only imitate the actions of others. Certainly animals neither have morals, nor can they develop morals. Humans by moral thoughts bring light to the Cherabim; humans by moral deeds bring warmth to the Seraphim.

    [page 129, 130] Look, there come the cherubim; they collect the light and use it for the further world order — and all of us are lights set out in the world order. While we think, perceive, and form concepts, we are the lights of the cherubim in the world order. Just as a light illuminates the space here in the physical world, so are we the lights in the spiritual world for the cherubim. While we are thinking, light appears in us; the light of thoughts radiates from us, and that illuminates the world in which the cherubim live.

          When we carry into our body from the world of the hierarchies the substances from which moral impulses are born and these penetrate our whole organization, will impulses, actions follow. Everything we do happens because will impulses are active in us. Then what is going on in the external world through us, insofar as it is a moral action, is collected by the seraphim, and this moral activity is the source of warmth for the entire world order. Under the influence of people who act immorally, the seraphim freeze; that is, they receive no warmth with which they can heat the whole cosmic world. Under the influence of moral action, the seraphim obtain the forces through which the cosmic world is preserved, just as the physical world order is preserved through physical warmth.

    There is no better description of the importance of warmth to the world than as portrayed in the movie "A. I. Artificial Intelligence". As the world is taken over by robots, the external world freezes over due to the lack of warmth created by the moral deeds of humans who no longer exist. If animals have no moral capability, then certainly human-made machines, no matter how sophisticated, will never be capable of moral actions. All attempts to portray that process of robots or androids with moral actions presuppose the existence of the very thing they strive to show is possible given enough technology. Given enough technology humans can destroy themselves, either in a Big Bang or in a frozen whimper, but only living humans with moral thoughts can light up the Cherabim or warm up the Seraphim.

    Read the Review at:
    http://www.doyletics.com/arj/innerre.htm

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    I hear often from my Good Readers that they have bought books after reading my book reviews. Keep reading, folks! As I like to remind you, to obtain more information on what's in these books, buy and read the books — for less information, read the reviews.


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    8. COMMENTARY:
    = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

    In this section I like to comment on events in the world, in my life, and in my readings which have come up during the month. These are things I might have shared with you in person, if we had had the opportunity to converse during the month. If we did, then you may recognize my words. If I say some things here which upset you, rest assured that you may skip over these for the very reason that I would likely have not brought up the subject to spoil our time together in person.

    1. Padre Filius Reads Ulysses and Gets Hungry this Month:

    Padre Filius, the cartoon character created by your intrepid editor and would-be cartoonist, will appear from time to time in this Section of the Digest to share us on some amusing or enlightening aspect of the world he observes during his peregrinations.

    This month the good Padre is looking for a place to sit, have a sandwich, and read his copy of Ulysses.



    2.Comments from Readers:

    • EMAIL from a first cousin, once removed, Paulette, in Texas:
      Dear Bobby,
      I found the picture of Mama (Gladys Boquet LeCompte) on your website. We were wondering if you could email the picture file to me, because we'd like to get prints made of it. It was a good picture of Mama in happier times. I'd appreciate it a lot!

      Hope you and yours are well.
      Sincerely,
      Paulette LeCompte Malamud

    • EMAIL from Patrick in Houston, TX:
      Bobby/Del

      Hope you and all your family had a great '08 and looking forward to '09

      God Bless
      Patrick Clark

    • EMAIL from Lawrence Clark in Idaho:
      Dear Bobby,

      I agree it does look like Santa!
      Actually, I have been to the City of the Rocks, just North of it several years ago, I hunted mule deer in November on two different visits. I made one of my best stalks and best shots hunting in 14 to 16 inches of snow. I've never been there in the summer, but will make it this coming Spring as I'll be heading to Arizona again and could visit the site on my return trip. I have walked the Northern portion of the City of the Rocks, not hunting just to explore. It does appear man made but as you know is not, rather very large erosion resistant grainte boulders.

      Lawrence

    • EMAIL from David Bonvillian in Missouri:
      Bobby,

      Good morning... I got your name from Jack Blair - married to Sheila, Alvin Bonvillian's daughter. Alvin is my Dad, he and my mom were divorced when I was very young. Jack said you used to work at Waterford, interesting, I left Belle Chasse to go to work at the Callaway Nuclear Plant in Missouri 28 years ago. I am in a Shift Manager position at this time. Jack told me you have information on my Dad's side of the family. I would be very interested in what ever you could share.

      God Bless,<br> David Bonvillian

    • EMAIL from Patti and Armand St. Martin in New Orleans:
      Happy New Year to you and Del!

      We look forward to reading the Digest!

      Our love,
      Patty and Armand

    • EMAIL from Kevin Dann in New York:
      Bobby,

      Got my wires crossed. Somehow I thought John had mentioned trying to get you to do something for the "News for Members" sheet that goes out to Anthroposophical Society members (and friends!). He's an old acquaintance who could be a great shot in the arm of a fairly stiff Society organ, and I thought you could bring just the right bit of Cajun spice into his endeavor.

      [Note to my Good Readers: I sent off a suggestion that the newsletter be named "INK" as a reminder that non-anthroposophically-inclined materialists will get no meaning out of it except for the chemical analysis of the ink on the paper.]

    • EMAIL from Paul Werner in New Orleans re: Hamlet Staging in Sweden in Axel Munthe's Story of San Michele.
      Bobby,

      I have been to the villa many years ago, but I had known little of Munthe. The ghost story reminds me of many stage horrors I have encountered. None of these ever got the warm reception he received.

      Thanks for sharing,
      Paul

    • EMAIL from Betty Chowning in Kentucky and Texas at times:
      Bobby

      You tell that Del she gets more elegant and beautiful as time passes! How does she do that? It must be you take such good care of her, right? You both are a very handsome. happy looking couple. The snow was beautiful. That is more than we have had. It has just been cold and dreary here, gray looking days. But in TX last week, I enjoyed the 70's after a Monday of fog and sleet with the airport shut down. Both of you have a wonderful 2009!

      Hugs,
      Betty

    EMAIL from Ray Friesen in OZ. Click Here to see info above.
    Hi Bobby!

    I was wandering around the internet, and stumbled across doyletics. Yay more talking about fun books! Good onya, our universe needs more of that.

    As an author and cartoonist myself, I thought I should say hello, and point you toward my website! Here's hoping mine is the sort of humor you enjoy, and that you'd like to share what I do with all your readers!

    Thanks very much! If you are inclined to talk about me on your site after this, I'd like to do anything possible to help! If you do interviews, I'm available, if you need pictures, anything on my site is up for grabs, and if you have any special requests, I'd love to help in anyway I can! I like to spread the love, but not too thin or else you can't taste it.

    Ray

    3. Dealing with Email Scam

    In my Mailwasher preview screen I noted an email with an attachment from a place called ikea.com. It seemed like a legitimate company, but was the email also legitimate? I typed in the URL ikea.com into my IE7 browser and looked at the US portion of this world-wide company's website. I found this message which described the very email I had found questionable. It clearly identifies that email as a spam scam containing a virus.

    E-mail scam
    IKEA has discovered that a malicious e-mail is circulating encouraging users to install attached new IKEA home planner software. The e-mail and attached software is not from IKEA and it includes a malicious Trojan software which is installed once the attachment is opened. Safety and security issues are prioritized issues at IKEA and we would like to apologize for any inconvenience caused by this e-mail. We ask all receivers to delete the e-mail immediately.
    Even if you don't have a Mailwasher preview screen, you can delete the email and escape harm if you avoid downloading the malicious software. Treat software from any company, no matter how reputable as if it were from a malicious stranger, until you confirm that it is not. It is unlikely that you will be the very first person to encounter a virus email, so snopes.com or the company itself can help you avoid problems. But discretion is always advised: simply do NOT download an attachment you were not expecting from someone you do not know.

    4. Hidden Taxes of Inflation Example: HOMESTEAD EXEMPTION

    How many of you live in a home worth $75,000 or less? In Louisiana, you are exempt from property taxes if you do. That amount was put in several decades ago when it covered most of the homes in our state. Now it covers few homes, as you can imagine. Yet every other year or so, they have raised the assessed value of the homes and not lowered the tax rate to accompany the assessment. The only permanent way to achieve the goal of not assessing a person's home is to return to a full HOMESTEAD EXEMPTION.

    Until that day comes, you can at least sign this petition to raise your HOMESTEAD EXEMPTION to a still paltry, but more reasonable 160,000 dollars. Maybe even have it indexed to inflation to prevent automatic tax increases and moving into higher brackets due to inflation caused by the incompetence of the so-called government in the first place. http://www.petitiononline.com/lahomeex/petition.html

    Please remember that every time a FIXED DOLLAR VALUE is assigned to any tax rate, such as the ALTERNATE MINIMUM TAX, that value will be soon reached due to inflation and suddenly the Middle Class will be taxed as RICH PEOPLE under our socialistic, so-called "Progressive" but really Regressive system of taxation.

    The good news is that, although prices for all goods since the 1960s have gone up at least 10 times, the price of gasoline is still a minimal 13.5 cents at current prices. At its peak a few months ago, it was only about 39 cents a gallon, the typical 1970 high mark. If you're over 50, do yourself a favor and divide every price by moving the decimal to the left one place, so that you won't rant over a $20 parking fee used to be only $2.

    I saw a cartoon once where a guy was talking to a friend at a bus stop about a dream he had, "I dream that I was making a million dollars year, so I went to a bar to celebrate and the beer cost me $150!" With an absence of true government, our coercive bureaucracy will continue to force prices up by a factor of ten every couple of decades, so learn adjust your expectations with a comfort level in mind. Relax. If Italics can do it, so can You.

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    9. CLOSING NOTES:
    = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

    Thanks to all of you Good Readers for providing the Chemistry which has made this site a Glowing Success. — Especially those of you who have graciously allowed us to reprint your emails and show photos of you and by you on this website — you're looking good! As of June 1, 2019, it enters its 20th year of publication. The DIGESTWORLD Issues and the rest of the doyletics website pages have received over 21.6 MILLION VISITORS ! ! !

    We have received over ONE MILLION VISITORS per Year to the Doyletics Website since its inception June 1, 2000, over twenty years ago. Almost 2 million in the past 12 months. We are currently averaging about 150,000 visitors a month. A Visitor is defined as a Reader who is new or returns after 20 minutes or more has passed. The average is about one visitor for every 10 Hits.

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    My reviews are not intended to replace the purchasing and reading of the reviewed books, but rather to supplant a previous reading or to spur a new reading of your own copy. What I endeavor to do in most of my reviews is to impart a sufficient amount of information to get the reader comfortable with the book so that they will want to read it for themselves. My Rudolf Steiner reviews are more detailed and my intention is bring his work to a new century of readers by converting his amazing insights into modern language and concepts.

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    Maintaining a website requires time and money, and apart from sending a donation to the Doyletics Foundation, there are several ways you can show your gratitude and support our efforts to keep doyletics.com on-line.

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    The best source at the best price is to order your copies on-line is from the publisher Random House/Xlibris's website above.

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