"You are gods who have forgotten who they are. You are emperors who have fallen asleep and are dreaming that they have become beggars. Now beggars are trying to become emperors, in dreams they are making great efforts to become emperors, and all that is needed is to wake up!" ~ Osho
A time capsule was found atop a bell tower at Mexico City's Metropolitan Cathedral, where it was placed in 1791 to protect the building from harm, researchers said Tuesday.
The lead box — filled with religious artifacts, coins and parchments — was hidden in a hollow stone ball to mark the moment on May 14, 1791, when the building's topmost stone was laid, 218 years after construction had begun.
Also inside was an engraving of Saint Barbara, a Roman Catholic martyr associated with lightning whose image served as "a religious lightening rod, to protect against damage," said archaeologist Xavier Cortes, director of historic buildings for the National Council of the Arts and Culture.
A perfectly preserved parchment listed the time capsule's contents — including 23 medals, 5 coins, and five small crosses made of palm fronds — which it said were "for protection from the storms."
The cathedral was built on the swampy terrain of a former island and partially atop an Aztec pyramid.
Researchers in England and Switzerland have figured out ways to confuse the sensory signals received by the brain, allowing people to seem to be standing aside and watching themselves.
And what would happen to the self if a person could effectively move their eyes to another part of the room and observe themselves from an outside perspective? Would the self move with the eyes, or stay in the body, he wondered.
They felt "that their center of awareness 'self' is located outside their physical bodies and that they look at their bodies from the perspective of another person," he reported.
n a second test, Ehrsson connected sensors to the skin to measure electrical conductance, which indicates emotional response.
He then allowed them to watch a hammer swing down to a point below the camera, as though it were going to hurt an unseen portion of the virtual body.
Their skin conductance registered emotional responses including fear, indicating they sensed their selves had left their physical bodies and moved to the virtual bodies where the hammer was swung.
Amid all these ruminations on modern-day matrimony, “Mad Men” on basic cable’s AMC stands out as the control, a reminder of what marriage was like for previous generations....and it has this killer kicker.
This Madison Avenue drama, set in the advertising business at the dawn of the 1960s, recreates middle-class life in the pre-Friedan era, when graduates of Wellesley and Bryn Mawr wore girdles and aprons as they raised the children and waited for their husbands, who stayed in town late, drinking and smoking and carousing with compliant secretaries. “Mad Men” has a satiric edge, but it is a stark reminder of what the battle of the sexes looked like before women’s lib, civil rights, the Pill and legalized abortion.
You’re born alone and die alone. Framed by silence, secrets and solitude, these modern relationships suggest you also love alone. It’s depressing to look too closely at the inner workings of any marriage. Viewers are advised to keep in mind that wedlock is a little like Churchill’s definition of democracy: an institution that is the worst, except for all the others.
Yes, origami. I know, weird, but it really worked. I am a project oriented person so I needed to channel this origami folding into something greater so I found that I could fold origami but
I decided that I will make 1000 cranes for the peace monument in Hiroshima, Japan. It was all the inspiration I needed to continue now that I had an end result to shoot for.
I have completed over 400 cranes and I have was pretty proud of that. However, I recently found out that they accept the cranes year round but only drape the monument in August for the anniversary of the atom bomb.This means I need to get busy!
“I was always last-picked for teams, and it was devastating,” Apatow told me one day just before “Knocked Up” started shooting. “I gravitated toward comedians because they were the ones who were pointing out hypocrisy and lying. I needed someone to tell me that it was O.K., because I felt really bad.”
Both of the films Apatow has directed offer up the kind of conservative morals the Family Research Council might embrace — if the humor weren’t so filthy. In “Virgin,” the title character is saving himself for true love. “Knocked Up,” which opens on June 1, revolves around a good-hearted doofus who copes with an unplanned pregnancy by getting a job and eliminating the bong hits. In each of the films, the hero is nearly led astray by buddies who tempt with things like boxes of porn, transvestite hookers and an ideology about the ladies possibly learned from scanning Maxim while scarfing down Pop-Tarts. By the end, Apatow exposes the friends as well meaning but comically pathetic and steers his men toward doing the right thing.
Throughout the writing of “The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” Apatow wrestled with how to show the joy of the lead character Andy’s first time. Often, he would turn on his cellphone and find a message like this one from Garry Shandling, his comedy mentor: “You have to make us understand that Andy’s sex is better than everybody else’s sex in the movie — because he’s in love.” In the end, Apatow had Andy marry and then have sex. Andy does it twice. The first time lasts less than a minute. After the second time, he breaks into a hosanna of “Aquarius” from “Hair.” The camera switches to a pastoral field where he is joined in song and dance by the rest of the cast. It was completely ludicrous and possibly the most uplifting end to a Hollywood comedy in years. The movie cost $26 million, earned $177 million and made many critics’ Top-10 lists at the end of 2005.
He volunteered for experimental drug regimens. It was too late for him, but his experience may have helped others. The cocktails he was given were brutal; in many ways they were worse than the disease. But he didn't give up. In a certain Christian sense, it was a redemptive thing for him. He must suffer so that others may have better lives. He understood this, and willed his body to accept his decision.
"Whether it changes any minds, the advertisement marks a radical departure in the way politics is conducted in the United States and suggests that the 2008 campaign could be an uncontrolled, and uncontrollable, free-for-all in which ordinary citizens could hold as much sway as fancy consultants and advertising agencies lobbying the main candidates for their business."
The Walter Reed story is a reminder that in the solar system of journalism, newspapers are the sun, the source of energy around which everything else revolves.
"Last week I bought a gun. Yesterday I wrote the note. But last night I happened to turn on your show and just knowing that someday I might be able to go back into my church, I threw the gun in the river. My mom never has to know."
-- A boy in Iowa
POW Jessica Lynch names newborn for fallen comrade
PARKERSBURG, West Virginia (AP) -- Former POW Jessica Lynch became a mother on Friday, giving birth to a girl whom she named in honor of a fallen comrade.
Dakota Ann Robinson was delivered by Caesarean section at a local hospital at 5:10 p.m. ET. The infant weighed 7 pounds, 10 ounces, said Lynch's publicist, Aly Goodwin Gregg.
"She's fabulous and fat," Gregg said. "She's beautiful."
Lynch and her boyfriend, Wes Robinson, named Dakota in honor of Lynch's friend, Army Spc. Lori Piestewa of Tuba City, Arizona, who was the first woman to be killed in combat in Iraq. The baby and Piestewa share the middle name of Ann, and the name Dakota means friendship or ally, Gregg said.
Lynch and Piestewa served together in the 507th Maintenance Company from Fort Bliss, Texas. They were roommates there and tentmates in Iraq. Piestewa died and Lynch was captured when their unit was ambushed on March 23, 2003, near Nasiriyah.
Virtual real estate tycoon Anshe Chung has been forced to abandon a public forum inside the 3-D online world of Second Life after virtual vandals - known as griefers - launched a phalanx of flying phalluses.
Anshe, a former language teacher from China whose real name is Ailin Graef, was appearing inside the virtual world at an event hosted by the online technology news publisher CNET.
Last month, Anshe announced that she had accumulated virtual assets worth more than $US1 million in real money, making her - by her own claim - the first virtual world millionaire.
"She is very popular, and some people don't like her," said CNET reporter Daniel Terdiman, whose Second Life avatar (online persona), GreeterDan Godel, was interviewing Anshe at the time of the attack.
"She's made a lot of money, and is one of the most prominent of all Second Life residents. So to some people, some griefers, that makes her a target,"
Griefers are so-called because they create grief. Their antics are designed to interrupt proceedings in virtual worlds and games usually for no other reason than because they can.
Attacks like the one launched against Anshe are triggered by a program code that generates self-replicating objects.
Much like email spam, these "griefspawn" attacks can chew up system resources and slowing down performance. They can sometimes even trigger network crashes.
In October, griefers launched a self-replicating worm inside Second Life spawning a flood of "grey goo" that eventually caused a complete shutdown, locking out tens of thousands of members.
Other documented griefing attacks involved using images of objects that are design to upset and offend, including huge swastikas and, once, a model of the World Trade Centre in flames.
In this week's griefspawn attack, witnessed by about thirty avatars that were in the audience, the stage was bombarded by a barrage of over-sized penises.
Unable to continue the discussion because of the disruption, Anshe left the stage. The meeting was hastily reconvened in another room on property owned by Anshe.
But there was no escaping the griefers who attacked the new venue, eventually crashing the server which housed the auditorium. After a restart, the forum proceeded without interruption for another three hours.
The intent is that the participants concentrate any thoughts during and after orgasm on peace. The combination of high- energy orgasmic energy combined with mindful intention may have a much greater effect than previous mass meditations and prayers.
