Coping: With a Massive Outbreak of WuJo

Not sure why our “tales of the odd and misbehaving reality” should take a summer break, but whatever the reason, WuJo tales have been flooding into the inbox since Monday.

Let’s try this one on for size from reader Lisa:

“Hi George, Thanks for your site. I’ve found your work to be very informative and entertaining. I come from a medical, legal and educators background but have spent 40 years self studying wujo. I’ve had some remarkable experiences.

This one is new. I have a time shift? to share.

Maybe once or twice a week I will allow myself a small bowl of Bar B Q potato chips. It’s rare and I know when I choose to have them because I admit to a Pavlov response.

This day I poured the chips into the bowl, a couple fell over the edge. One on the counter and one “ack” to the floor. My ever ready hunting dog (Springer Spaniel) at point, in readiness. I motioned, he munched – as did I to the chip on the counter.

I turn to pat his head and send him off out of the kitchen. I turn back to the bowl and IT IS EMPTY!!!!!!!.

The bag is gone. I look up in the cabinet and the UNOPENED bag is on the shelf. Did we eat the chips????????? Did we shift dimensions??????? It’s been 2 days and I still haven’t opened the bag of chips!

All my life I’ve been ahead of my time. May have to come up with a new view on this.”

Researcher Note: Run next door and have someone smell your breath immediately – the smell of “BBQ chip breath” is unmistakeable. OR immediately brush teeth and look for (not to be gross) but bits of chip and yellowish phlegm. Still, Hmmm…

Next is a report from Roberta:

“Morphogenetic fields aside and other scientific bla-bla, I was fascinated by your clothes-on-the-chair incident.

Years ago, I was living in a rented house, and had applied for my first home loan. I was supposed to get an answer in a week. In the rented place, I had put a large hutch in the kitchen and the hutch was visible as you came in the front door.

One afternoon I came home from work and in the front door, looking briefly around the house as I set down my purse. The hutch was gone! Suddenly at attention, I looked away and then looked back. The hutch had returned.

At the time, I took it to mean that soon the hutch would not be there really, and that I had got my loan, which I had. Thanks to the wujo reports, I now understand such incidents to be a time slip, most likely guided by our thoughts. Such as before your clothes were “misplaced” on the chair, you were thinking of getting dressed in those clothes, leading to the time slip of having actually removed them from the chair to put them on–even though you hadn’t yet.

What blows my mind (excuse me, I’m from the 60′s) is that the time involved whereby the object seems to be “vanished” seems to be increasing. How long before it doesn’t come back at all? ”

Damn scary question…but that gets into the discussion of the “dream barrier” and just what is it that keeps us from spending more time in “dreamland” and not just “waking up” on that side? Or, is that what happens to crazy people…they wake up in our world which would be, from their perspective, crazy and illogical? Whew…serious wujo there.

But not all of it. Still have reader Sandra’s weird tale of the day:

“Hi George, I had a very bizarre experience last Saturday night/Sunday morning that I want to share with you.

We had a thunderstorm roll through our little central Texas town about midnight on Saturday, August 18. The sound of the storm woke me up, and I decided to connect to Coast to Coast am on my Ipod. Well, the wireless modem was down, and I re-booted it so I could make the connection. That did no good, so I tried twice more, with no success. So I turned over and was just about asleep, when someone started pounding on my front door and shined a flashlight into my window. I went to the door and shouted, “Who’s there!”. The answer was, “Bartlett Police!”, so I opened the door to find one of our officers standing there.

He stated that there were THREE hang-up 911 calls made from my house, and he was checking to see if I was OK. I assured him that I was OK, and that I was alone in the house and had no clue how 911 got dialed THREE times. I did tell him that I re-booted my ATT modem THREE times, but did not pick up the phone handset to make any calls. He seemed to think that the weather may have something to do with it, but who knows?

I closed the door, and now being wide awake, I went to the computer to try to listen to C2C there. As soon as I sat down at the desk the phone rang. I answered it, thinking that it might be the police again. But, no. It was some woman who I did not know, demanding to know why I had called her phone at 12:30 on a Sunday morning.

I explained what had just happened with the 911 calls and the police, but she just hung up on me. I guess she thought that I was either drunk or a prankster (I was neither).

Que the theme from “Twilight Zone”. This morning, I called ATT to report the problem, and the guy that took my call just couldn’t believe my story, saying that it was the most weird report he had ever taken. They are going to send someone out today to check out the phone lines, but I’ll be you a pint of Newcastle Brown that they find nothing. Have you heard of anything like this?

Anyway, I love your Urban Survival blog, and Peoplenomics as well. Keep up the good work! ”

Well, outside of Twilight Zone or One Step Beyond or maybe Outer Limits? No. But seems to me that it might be an interaction with the base unit of the cordless phone and the DSL modem.

Now, what about that beer?

Oh, and here’s one more juicy one from a lady named Paulette…which is reaslly odd because it has to do with flying…

“This morning I saw an obit in the (paper) newspaper for a woman named Jane Unhjem The obit said she died in the crash of a Socata Tobago. Years ago, a Jane (thought that could be the last name) and her husband Erik took me up in their Tobago because I was thinking about buying a Tobago or Trinidad. I went up a couple of times with her. Jane and Erik lived in NY but i met them at Oshkosh. SO when I saw Jane and Erik Unhjem, NY and Tobago all together in the obit, I immediately thought of her BUT the weird thing is – It’s not the woman I knew. In fact, upon digging further (reading more of the obits online), the plane that crashed was not even flown by Jane (the one that died). Now maybe this is not that weird but I think it is. In the split second that I realized it was not her, I got this very odd flash of sensation of a time split or parallel universe divergence or something that I obviously cannot articulate. Like for one very brief moment it was almost as if I understood the concept completely and then poof – that feeling or clarity just vanished and I was left sort of realizing that it wasn’t Jane and how I had thought that it was…”

WuJo Mystery of the Day

From reader Grady:

“My standard plug in the wall phone went dead for a few days. Today, a fellow with a cell phone called me and asked why my phone was the only number his cell phone could call. So, I check to see if there was such a thing as a telephone virus. But, all I could find were telephone virus scams. What gives?”

BTSOOM…but maybe some readers have ideas? Did the guy have a Chinese or Iranian accent?

Anagramistically Speaking

Love this note from reader Elana who got it from someone who got it from….

“Incidentally, have just discovered that ‘Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan’ is an anagram for ‘My Ultimate Ayn Rand porn’.”

Remember the old school saying that if you had a thousand monkeys with typewriters, eventually they would type the works of Shakespeare? Well, no one said what would happen with 4-billion people pounding on keyboards 24-7 seeking….what?

Seriously Survivalist Pizza

A little background here: My friend SurvivalWoman and I have been friends for a long time – like almost 40-years. In fact, way back in the day we were exchanging cooking hints in the early 70′s – before either of us met our spouses. One of he signature recipes back then was a burgundy beef stew which was simply amazing. I’m not sure whether it was because of being cooked about 9-hours in a slow crock pot, the herbs which came fresh from here apartmwent deck freshly-grown collection, or what, but that recipe has withstood the test of time and I figure since borrowing it back then it may account for as much as 2-pounds of long-term George weight.

Why tell you all this? Ah… This morning’s BackdoorSurvival.com has a recipe for homemade pizza. And it promises to be another one of those recipes of hers worth stealing.

Of course, the George version of the pizza would use a more conventional kind of paste (cans of which store well) and for toppings, I would use tons of mozarella cheese and fresh mushrooms and bay shrimp. I’m a sucker for shrimp pizza like Shakey’s used to make in the Pacific Northwest, although I’ve had great shrimp pizza in California, too.

One definitional note: I’m assuming you can figure out what a pizza stone is. You can pick them up off amazon for about $42 and they add to the cooking of breads and pastries, too (though I’m off pastries).

Try one of these: Old Stone Oven 4467 14-Inch by 16-Inch Baking Stone ($42).

The other term which she uses a couple of times in the article is for a “peel” which is the big flattish oversized pancake-turner-like whizzie used for getting pizza out of the oven

I’ve got one of the aluminum ones on order Pizzacraft PC0202 25.75″ x 12″ Aluminum Pizza Peel with Hardwood Handle (about $24) but there are plenty of other ideas about how to get the finished pizza out of the oven, including a traditional wood peel.

I’m not much of a fan of wood peels. Always seemed to me as though this was one of those things where the thinner metal was always a plus and how big is a health risk of aluminum going to be getting a pizza out, for heavens sake!

Only other thing that you might not have in your gear is a pizza rocker. You don’t need to spend a lot of money on one of these – about $11 buycks for a RSVP World Class Pizza Cutter which will do you up to about a 14″ pie.

One of the great joys of cooking is taking a freshly baked pizza out of the oven, cutting it in half (you cut, I pick) and sitting down to some mouth-watering treats with a good slug of Italian vitamins (like a Chianti).

To be sure, it’s a little warmish to be doing pizza down here in the South, mainly because warming up the oven is not what particular smart when it’s 98-degrees outside. Still, I’ve cooked some passable pizza on the warming rack of the gas-fired BBQ, and since you’re going to be making your own dough, you can make it more or less warming rack-sized.

Oh, and the other joy of backing on the BBQ (I gotta write an ebook about this!) is that you don’t have to worry about cheeze drippings. Not that they are a problem on a pizza stone so much, but some day I will tell you the adventures of Elaine putting a piece of foil down in the bottom of our oven to catch the “George drippings” in the oven when I was making something-or-other which was messy.

What happened was the oven heating element is under tyhis enameled metal bottom plate, and so when the oven was cooking away, the aluminum foil melted into the enamel.

Well, don’tcha know that looked like crap? So it was off to www.nationalparts.com when I ordered the new enamel bottom plate and put it in…only about a 5-minute job (two screws) to change it out. But it’s amazing how easy it is to find parts for this, that, and everything on the web. Mioght even devote a future Peoplenomics to some of the more obscure sources and how to find them, since as we wander further in the economic depression, the more important keeping things in good repair (since we won’t be able to afford replacements) will become.

And, as with SurvivalWoman’s pizza recipe, it’s one thing to be broke, but if you’ve got a good helping of “comfort food” at hand, at least you’re not poor.

And that’s always been a key difference to keep in mind: BROKE means out of money and we’ve all been there. POOR means out of spirit, attitude, and spunk and there’s never any reason for a self-actualizing person to ever be poor.

Write when you break even…

George Ure (email comments to george@ure.net)