There aren’t too many movies I will watch more than once, since the plot and the rest doesn’t change on second viewing. But still, there are some, like The Adjustment Bureau that are so close to filling in a huge number of questions about how people live, and how small changes ripple into the future, that we watched in again last night.
The premise of it is simple: Yes, we have “free will” but it’s a bounded thing which means, if you remember set theory from your school days, that our range of motion is not totally constrained – more like the choices are usually limited.
A fine thinking piece comes from reading a few books on electronic voice phenomena (EVP) where supposedly, The Dead are living in a world of exaggerated colors and some are purported dead scientists who are trying to get back into contact with our present reality to get messages to loved ones and so forth.
By the descriptions “coming over” as reported in some EVP books, the colors in this “other world” are far more intense than is this one – and there are other colors completely.
Anyway, back to point, this is an example of a “bounding problem” – since we all know that the color wheel is a pretty well established thing in this world. Since we are creatures of bounded sets (where color and the limits to color are set by societal conventions and limitations of the optic nerve, and so forth) we accept unconsciously or otherwise that we can only see so many colors and that’s that.
Here’s a simple little task to keep you occupied: Come up with a color that is non-existent in our shared reality and is truly from “outside”. Then you will have gone somewhere. Or dream up a flavor that has never been built before – that kind of thing.
And it’s here that The Adjustment Bureau is such a fine movie.
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Since I watched it last night, I’ve noticed a few small adjustments in my life.
For one, since my son’s visit, our digital bathroom scale now lives in a new location in the master bath.
Now, you have to understand that I don’t weigh myself with my glasses on (they weight something, right?) and we have a dressing chair.
Took the glasses off, thoughtless tossed the glasses on the chair, weighed myself, and then sat down to put on my socks and just as I sat down, guess what?
So now I have a broken pair of glasses to get fixed – minor thing – maybe – as it looks like the nylon rimless part just snapped. But that sets up a trip to the eyeglass emporium and for all I know, I will do something on that previous unscheduled trip that somehow causes (or saves us from) World War III.
Butterfly effect.
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But it wasn’t just the glasses broken. That would have been fine.
Nossir, that lead to tearing apart my flight bag looking for my backup glasses (no luck, of course) and then the search for the spare pair in the office. Case was there but the glasses missing.
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Earlier this week, I got an email from a reader who I knew from my rock & roll news director days back in Seattle. Got the computer fired up only to learn that the email I’d sent to her got rejected by her server (in Canada).
And then, while I’m trying to get that resent (it was rejected by her server again, so WTF?) my wireless keyboard decides to stick in the “won’t type anything” mode.
And this in turn leads me to my #3 server to look up how to turn the Microsoft wireless keyboard back on, which leads to the discovery that Server 3 needs to have its wireless card reset.
No time for that, so on to Server 2, normally used for audio-video production, such as an upcoming interview for the Strategic Living site, and for the www.fifthorderhouse.com sites. After looking up the information I need, but just barely. that server decides it needs to restart but by then I’m back at Server 1 which has by now gotten ready to restart.
All of which would be fine, except that now Server 1 thinks we need to perform a disk integrity check, but I tell it no, gambling I can make it through this morning’s column and will have plenty of time later to accomplish that.
By now, I’ve pissed away 45-minutes, don’t have anything written for the column this morning, and since this is garbage day, I have to spend an extra 10-minutes before publishing time taking out the garbage.
So apparently, Universe, Adjustment Bureau, or whatever, wanted to detail my writing about something this morning because sure as hell it’s been every tripwire in the book getting even this far.
Don’t know if you’ve ever had days like this one, but today is sure off to a strange beginning.
It’ll be interesting what else pops up between now and upload time….or maybe it’s all just an intricate way of reminding Clif to get the movie and watch it while we still all have power. Hard telling.
After locking myself out of the house while wheeling the garbage out to the road, I finally went through the flight bag and there was a pair of glasses. I was back in business; and apparently that was all the adjusting I needed.
Marketing of WuJo
Reader idea:
Hey George!
I was thinking that you might consider putting up a place to record wujo events like your dream center. A national wujo center? I LOVE reading the wujos!! That would be so cool!! Just a thought.
There you have it! Proof readers in Missouri are capable of thinking!
Look Out – Above!
Mention of a new sunspot rotating around, which oughta be earth-directed pretty quick, might be worth watching brought this passing thought:
· There’s a new sunspot emerging in the shape of a ring and it goes by the name AR1413 and it’s thought that it may be a harbinger of a large solar flare, since there seems to be some science behind that idea.
Could this have anything to do with the 314 number?
If it is, then we can add huge sunspot/coronal mass ejections to our worry list for the March 2-9 change window. I’m still hoping it amounts to nothing.
And speaking of that:
Mornin’ G,
Just got done reading the future report…. So if the economic/monetary system is going to collapse, and ( from what I infer ) the fed gov’t is going to become irrelevant over the next year or so…. Who are we going to be paying our taxes to? Are we even going to be paying taxes ( as we know them today )?
If you don’t have the time to answer this email, maybe you could address this question in your column.
Have a good one George and pet your neglected cat for me… I hope I’m not the only one looking forward to all the chaos coming this way…. adapt, evolve, and overcome.
Well, let’s put it this way: I am only slowly working on my income tax prepping so far. I’ve gone far enough to see that we will have a (small dammit) refund coming, but it is a little lower on my tax list. That’s was just scrambled with the glasses trip today or tomorrow…depending on if/when the other pairs show up.
Oh…and Zeus the Cat has hired a class action lawsuit outfit to sue Elaine and me for everything we have (which ain’t much) since we put a flea collar on him and Pusscilla Catly this week.
Zeus’s demand letter (runs about 10 pages) says he gets to eat fresh shrimp, fresh chicken, and so on plus, if I’m reading it right, we’re supposed to start raising mice for him to hunt at his pleasure. It’s a rambling letter, but he goes into some detail how humans already raise animals for bloodsport (he mentioned fish farms specifically) and it’s the least we can do.
Otherwise, goes the rambling, he and Pusscilla want all our dough ($58.12) as damages for putting collars on them which contain poisons.
I’ve hired a law firm locally to respond, and I’ve got some pictures of ticks – one half an inch long and all blown up like a balloon, that have fallen off of him. So our defense is going to be “greater good” while his team is going down the pollution, contamination, and may cause cancer route.
We’re hoping to come up with an out of court settlement. Wait till I tally up the cost of his calls to 900 numbers like the HOT KITTY and so forth.
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Meantime, back on this “314″ case:
Hello George,
I meant to write you back on Monday January 23 (Pie Day) but did not get around to it. Now it may have been for the better because something came to my attention just yesterday that goes along with what I was going to write about. Anyway, here goes…
You’ve been writing about people having the numbers 314 come up in various ways. Then you mentioned that National Pie Day was coming up. Seeing both of those together I couldn’t help thinking pie -> pi -> 3.14 -> 3/14 -> March 14th -> Pi Day.
So I had to look that up and found that July 22 (22/7 in non-US locations) is considered Pi Day but I say March 14th makes more sense. That’s what I was going to write.
But then yesterday I was realizing that I hadn’t received any updates from an astrology site (www.laraowen.com) I like to read so I went to the site to find out what was going on. I found out that she had updated her site(s) and the old email list was no longer being used. Anyway, she did have a new post with a forecast for 2012. Imagine my surprise to find her forecast contains a specific reference to March 14 as follows:
In the first half of the year there is the potential for wealth creation and for some practical solutions to improve the global financial situation, with several trines in earth signs involving Mars, Jupiter and Pluto, and a spectacular grand trine between the three planets on March 14 at 9 degrees (lucky and opportunity-rich especially for those born around April 29/30, September 2/3 and December 30/31). The shadow side of the amplified earth energy involving these particular planets is an overweening and arrogant greed. It highlights desires to dominate property or land and to ensure ownership and control (the conflict about Scotland’s potential independence from the UK is coming to center stage, for example).
Note the shadow side part. Need I say more.
Uh-huh…say, want a cat?
Another TGA Report
Say what? Oh! Temporary Global Amnesia….what we we talking about with all these missing time reports?
Hi George
Sounds like transient global amnesia — at least that was the diagnosis my neurologist gave me after multitudes of tests showed… nothing wrong. (a relief). I was sitting at my computer, late afternoon @4:30p, checking the traffic going north from Orange County, to see if it would make sense to meet my pilot cousin for dinner near LAX (I was to call him back). The next thing I know, it’s dark outside. After 6. Where was I? What happened? Did I have a stroke? (I ran to the mirror to check my face, noting to self that if I were running, … probably not). I had a vague sense of going to the kitchen for a glass of water during the blackout time.
The neurologist conveyed: it happens, usually only once, never in circumstances where the brain is truly engaged, but when it’s in an “idle” state. Think of it like rebooting a computer — takes awhile to rebuild. No ill effects, except I didn’t trust me for awhile — scary. Or… welcome to middle age (I’m not going to live forever?)
By the way, I noticed the humming over Christmas while I was visiting my sister in Mariposa (Sierra foothills). Her house sits on top of a granite dome. Seems to sync with the findings this morning. Interesting.
I’m not sure what to make of it: Maybe the worldwide web really is like a new, breakthrough technology and a lot of previously unreported phenomena are just starting to get noticed. Or, maybe there is something in the water, chemtrails, medicines, food supplies, or whatever, that is causing it to happen now and then.
Or maybe it’s something else…just connecting with our inner selves where time stops being relevant.
Write when you break even: george@ure.net
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1970′s Housing Prices to Come
Several readers wrote in after our “simple investment system” which is based on price channel charting in the long term. This week, I have borrowed a few common charts (gold, oil, wheat, and housing) to give you some examples of how the “simple system” can be applied to almost any class of investment for which you have a chart of past performance handy. That’s a good thing – but also a bad thing when you consider the implications for Housing. First, however, a romp through the headlines…
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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 $50 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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Last week’s report is always here.
