This is dandy! I discovered it this morning in my email, since I haven’t really used this computer since our last trip (Thanksgiving’ish) last year. for some reason it popped up today when I was going through the I-Ching inbox…
“Hello George,
Most days my wife heads down the soi (that’s Thai for ‘street’) to grab me a strong takeaway coffee from the nearby Wawee Coffee Shop (a local northern Thai franchise). She takes our 14 month old son with her – he enjoys pushing his pram (that’s Australian / English for ‘stroller’) and occasionally sitting in it too. I’m usually at home, working away (I am fortunate enough to work from home) and praying that the crushing caffeine withdrawal headaches don’t erupt before she gets back with the goods, so to speak!
Anyway, this morning she came home from the walk rather freaked out. She typed up her experience during today and asked me to forward it on to you (she knows I’m a regular reader and I’ve mentioned some Wujo to her previously). I’ve pasted her text below. Best to you, {reader].
Wujo Occurrence
Chiang Mai, Thailand 16 November 2011
This morning between 8:00am and 8:30am I was out on a morning walk with my 14 month old son. As we turned onto Nimmanhaemin Rd, Soi 9 (‘Soi’ is Thai for street), I stopped to put my son in his pram (stroller). We continued walking towards Wawee Coffee Shop in the direction of Doi Suthep mountain. I immediately noticed the Moon – shining amazingly bright for this time of morning and so big, it seemed so close to Earth. I couldn’t take my eyes off it as I walked up the road.
As we got closer to Wawee and a residential gate, where a small black dog lives (that my son loves and usually says hello to), a young couple (aged in their 20s, possibly early 30s) appeared riding on a bicycle, at speed, seemingly out of nowhere. The young man was pedaling while the girl sat side saddle on the back seat. They were Asian (not necessarily Thai) looking, with dark complexions.
The first thing that struck me as strange was their clothing – it looked very traditional and in an old style. The young man was wearing cream coloured flowing pants, a cream coloured long sleeved shirt and a maroon wrap around his shoulders. The young woman on the back of the bicycle had a blue floral shawl draped over her head. Muslim type attire came to mind. But the shawl was just resting over her head, like a classic Mary (Mother of Jesus) representation, not pinned down or seemingly attached in any way.
I thought their clothing was odd – as not many people get around dressed like this. Plus the traditional hill tribe clothing of this region looks different, so it wasn’t anything hill tribe.
The next thing I noticed were their radiant smiles – particularly the man, who was beaming. They were extremely happy smiles – not holding back in any way, big, genuine and free. They were both looking and smiling at my son in his pram.
As they passed me I stared at the young woman on the back of the bicycle, admiring her head shawl and thinking how strange it was that her shawl wasn’t blowing off with the speed of the bicycle. The shawl seemed to not even move or flutter about at all.
They looked so different to anyone I’d seen on the streets during the 8 years I’ve lived here. They struck me as not of this time.
The last thing I saw was the young woman’s face and shawl passing my field of vision as they cycled past. I walked a few more steps and had a strange feeling, I wanted to look at her shawl again – it was a beautiful floral pattern. I looked back behind me. The young couple was nowhere to be seen.
As Soi 9 is such a long road I would still have been able to see them cycling away.
Completely freaked out, I walked at a rapid pace back down the Soi to see if they had stopped by the side of the road, behind a parked 4wd or cycled into the nearby carpark – nothing.
No sign of them whatsoever. All of the nearby residential / house gates were closed and they are big metal gates that need to be opened (noisily and with some effort) before going inside. They had just vanished.
I might note that as the young couple approached and passed me, there wasn’t any noise coming from the bicycle, or either of them. In fact, all sounds seemed to disappear. I felt really strange and that I had experienced something way out of the ordinary. I looked at the Moon as my son and I continued to Wawee Coffee Shop and wondered if it (i.e. the Moon) had something to do with this strange phenomena.”
Yep, this is one for the books – and not out of keeping with our various reports of shape-shifting cars and so forth, either. Most strange, but what the hell isn’t these days? Remember in Clif’s work, we would start seeing/hearing of more cases oif surreality and we move along.
And, speaking of WuJo, Elaine and I went on a tour of a haunted bxuilding in downtown Vicksburg on this trip, so drop by tomorrow for some pictures from there…
Wujo Report #2: Bermuda Triangle Incident?
This one is pretty good, too:
“George, I have always read your Wujo reports with great interest. I’ve had two incidents in my life that I could describe as wujo events. After the truck incident this last Sunday, I thought I would share them with you.
This happened to me Sunday afternoon [5/6/12] returning home to OKC on I-40 East bound. I was about a mile or two west of the 44 South junction and was behind a semi. The truck had Heldal in large green letters on the back of the trailer and the number 8171 in large blue letters on the left bottom corner.
As we came up to the South bound exit, he gracefully changed left across three lanes of traffic to enter the 44 north bound lane. I entered the south bound lane on the right and started to merge onto 44 South bound.
Another rig was coming up fast, so I yielded to him and came in behind him. And lo and behold, accross the back of the trailer we Heldal in large green letters and the number 8171 in blue letters in the left bottom corner.
It was the same rig.
I have no idea how he could turned around and re-entered the south bound lane, since the next exit from where he entered the north lane was another two miles ahead. I am sorely confused at this “crossing” of paths. Any thoughts?
The other incident involved me and my trusty lil’ C172 SkyHawk and an aborted trip to Bimini.
I took off from Kissimmiee, Fl and landed in Ft. Lauderdale Executive to refuel (I am paranoid that way, plus I didn’t want to pay island prices for 100LL), checked the weather, drained the petcock and headed off east over the Atlantic. The Sun was directly above and water and the sky the exact same shade of blue, like flying into a blue bowl. Checked the instruments and everything looked good and I settled into what should have been an uneventful flight at 9,000′ MSL.
About 15 minutes after getting feet wet, I noticed that the Gyro was dead. A quick cross check and the entire cockpit was dead. Electric was still on and the radio still worked, but none of the navigation was working including the altimeter and the VSI. I radioed FXE and informed them that I was instrument out and was returning. I did a 180 by the whiskey compass and descended until I could see the waves. I returned to FXE and landed, had them check out the old bird, and they found nothing wrong.
I decided to return to Kissimmee and the flight back was unremarkable, except that all my instruments were working fine. Got home and spent the evening hanging out with dear old Jack. Never had another problem with plane.”
As I collect reports like this, it becomes clear that some people seem to experience many of these kinds of events, while others have none at all. Just one more bit of “out of placeness” on the truck – which at a design pattern level seems related to the Thailand bike story. The airplaine story? There was that missing Navy training flight and the disappearance of the search plane…roughly same neighborhood.
So is the Bermuda Triangle real? Bet’cha we can take an edjumacated guess at what this reader’s answer would be…
Urban Trends: Mail Theft
This was eye-opening:
“George —
You must have some pretty well-heeled readers if they don’t think your economic forecasting is accurate. I know I live in a city that routinely makes the lists of “The Worst of —”, but I don’t think we’re *that* atypical. We have stores closing all over and buildings staying empty. Where Border’s was is still empty, for instance. There was a returned vet pan-handling in Trader Joe’s parking lot a month ago. I felt like asking him if this was what he risked his life for, but thought that would be “salt in the wound”.
Don’t those readers do their own shopping?
The city closed one park because thieves had stolen the copper wiring for the lighting. Stealing copper has been an on-going problem here for many years. Foreclosures are as bad here as anywhere else, maybe worse. Nobody near them had any such trouble? Or do those readers not read or hear of their city, county and school budgets getting cut/slashed?
And then there’s what I’ve gotten tangled up in — mail theft. My postal carrier said it’s gotten so bad, they’ve been asked to report how much got stolen on their routes! I set two checks out for pick-up. Unfortunately, thieves got there first. Fortunately, they left the “evidence” in another box when they stole her money orders.
My carrier brought my two bills to me as soon as he found them and I immediately had stop payment orders put on the checks. But they changed the number on one check.
So, I had to clear that up with the grocery store that got taken. This was back in Feb. Yesterday, I got another dunning notice from that store. It seems they are still using my name and address, but fortunately (for me) not my ID and a different bank, so the store knows it wasn’t me — I guess the machine, or whatever, sends the duns without checking with people first.
Anyway, I hadn’t reported it to the police, but since they’re still involving me, that’s where I’m going this morning. For me, it’s just been a hassle, but for the banks and stores involved, it’s evidently getting serious.
In fact, your forecasts may be too rosy for a good many people.
On another topic, I enjoyed your notes on reading — sent them on to my sister who also reads constantly — but books, not these gadgets. But then I’m 80 and she’s close to that, so a different mind set from you young-uns. “
Personally, as I’m aging, I’m in the greatest race in life: Want to see if I can get my age to 100 or my IQ to 100…
A Fortune
Savory, this:
“George, I chuckled at your column today whereby readers took you to task for your various typos, and thought I’d toss something out for deciphering. I got this in a fortune cookie last night – Hubby calls it “Chinglish”:
“You own the most squander asset in the world-time.”
Really?? Can’t say I’m quite sure how to take this yet. ;-p”
Owning time is like owning weather. It’s there but often difficult to control.
Write when you break even: george@ure.net
Of Interest to Readers:
Be Sure to Visit: The UrbanSurvival Amazon store. Books, computers, software, and outdoor gear. You’re going to buy things on Amazon, so use this handy portal…
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New Battles for Internet Supremacy
(Macon, GA) “What does a columnist’s conference have to do with the future of banking, commerce, and how people live in the world today?” you could well be wondering to yourself. Well, as we’ll discuss here this morning, the whole point of going to a professional conference is to add to one’s personal recipe book; that composite model we each carry around in our heads that let’s us figure on the fly how everything fits together which – in turn -allows us to spot opportunity. These, on occasion, can be used to great financial advantage, or at least to help steer clear of potential pitfalls. Interesting stuff which we’ll get to after we parade a few early headlines.
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It has been a while since we have discussed high beta investment systems, but with the market more or less stuck in “boring” maybe we should see if there’s a way to play it, shall we? But not, of course, before tromping through some of the headlines that will push markets around next week, Still, it’s the poking around looking for new and different ways to make money (or hold onto value so you’ve got a little something for a rainy day) which is fun. Think of it has entry-level forensic economics…
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(Also) The “Flip-Side” of Virtual
In Wednesday’s report on the future of virtual reality glasses, a new technology which I think had pretty good potential to “pop” (standing 10-feet from a virtual 102″ screen is pretty snazzy stuff) which qualifies it as one of our serial get-rich-slowly paths, which usually seems to take years instead of days, but that’s another matter. What matters this morning is that as a friend (Oilman2) told me this week, there’s a really horrible side of virtual and he’s been kind enough to share details of how virtual is getting ready to start whacking jobs down in the oil patch. As usual, before we wade into the grim, we can recap the market and some of the major week ending headlines to see where that points…
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Safer Computing: Swearing Off Cookies
It has been a while since I roared the praises of the Maxa Cookie Manager which you can download and install for a free test drive by clicking here.
To upgrade from the demo to full working is still less than $30 (During their Spring Sale) and one heck of a bargain at that, if I do say so.
I am a high-reliability computing kind of guy – and near as I have it figured, the road to a hassle-free computing experience is (like flying an airplane) a matter of going through a proper checklist before popping onto the web:
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You need an active cookie manager – because sites you visit can put small bits of code on your computer and some of these are designed for Flash, have no expiration, and can really bugger-up the computing experience. This part gets handled by Maxa Labs’ product which on my system says 184,380 cookies have been removed, 73,881 “web bugs” which can track movement from site to site and such, and I have only 10-active cookies.
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Second thing you need is a good antivirus program – and I happen to really like Avira’s Antivir pro.
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Then you need to deal with Malware so for this Malware bytes is updated and run daily.
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And last, though certainly not least is the firewall and the one in Win 7 works fine.
Like anything in computers, updates are critical so before work every morning, the computer does its update ritual – Check of Maxa (5.3.02 is current) Avira, and Malware bytes.
Toss in a good bit of common sense (example: Don’t open email purporting to be from UPS, IRS, the US Post Office, or anything else that even has a hint of fishy odor to it) and first thing you know, the internet’s actually a useful tool.
“Live on $10,000″ A Year
Having a hard time making ends meet? (Like who isn’t, right?) A good starting point to better match up income with outgo is our $10 e-book “How to Live on $10,000 a Year…or less!”
It’s an automatic download. It’s written in an information dense style: The whole thing runs about 65 pages, but it gives you a vision of how to not only live on the cheap, but also how to migrate up the economic foodchain if you have a little hustle left. A bonus section called “How to Build Anything” should instill confidence if you’ve never taken on a home improvement/home creation project before, too….. Click here for the index and details.
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