The Adventures of Bloggard

Been Around the Block. Got Some Stories. These are Them.

Travels With No Charlie

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Medford, Oregon, June 6, 2018 — This morning as usual, I got up and dressed, and then I took myself for a walk.

As some of you know, usually gooddog Charlie takes me for my morning walk, but not today. Because last night at 8 o’clock my good Charlie died.

And this morning when I returned from my walk, his body was still lying upon his bed, his eyes open as if seeing something very faint and very far away.

And he remained so very, very still.

What Happened

A year ago, on our morning walk to the little hidden park a block away, while I was petting him and putting his leash back on, I discovered a lump on his chest. About the size of a half lemon. A few days later, the vet said she didn’t know what it was, but we should take it out.

She quoted an amazing amount of money, and frankly I didn’t have it. And over this year, [Read more…]

Leap Up, Fall Down – the Daylight Savings Scam

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Medford, Oregon – Daylight Savies Day, 2017 — Before I share my handy tip with you, I gotta say that in my opinion, William Willett has a lot to answer for, because best I can tell he was the scurvy dog — not Benjamin Franklin — who actually “invented” what is now Daylight Savings Time. Or maybe I should say he was the scurvy dog who unleashed the Daylight Savings Scam upon an unsuspecting populace.

‘Only a white man would believe that you could cut a foot off the top of a blanket and sew it to the bottom of a blanket and have a longer blanket.’ — Indian Saying

Ain’t it just the truth!

And right here, right now I want to put to rest the scurrilous rumors that [Read more…]

“Astro-Turfing” – How Media Manipulates Us with Fake Information

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Medford, Oregon and TED Talk, October 28, 2017 — Surprising information —

  • 90% of news media are controlled by six corporations. As a result,much of what you read and see can be an orchestrated story created by special interest groups
  • “Astro-Turf” means to falsify fake news, fake “information” so it appears to be a grass-roots movement. (IE: “fake grass”)
  • Alas, Wikipedia is often hijacked, because pages can be controlled by anonymous editors on behalf of special interests who reverse edits that go against their hidden agenda

Those of you who know me may remember that I’m not big on conspiracy theories because I think (a) humans do poorly at keeping a secret, and because (b) humans are poor at concerted action. Few events, however dreadful, require explanation of a wide conspiracy, when simple greed will suffice as explanation.

And I think that simple greed may be operating here, because …

Special interests have permeated our government, and with the weakening of newspaper revenues their journalistic integrity has slipped. Yesterday in conversation with a friend who once ran a department at the New York Times I heard confirmation that media’s ability to generate accurate original reporting is far less than what it once was.

An Eye-Opening Article about How We Are Tricked

Here is an eye-opening article which seems sound, spelling out how [Read more…]

Me and Fats Domino and Lee Perez

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MB Corral, Wichita Falls, 1959 — Well, the way it was, was that Fats Domino was real popular when he was still touring around after his big 1956 hit  (“Blueberry Hill”)  which had done so well, and so he was coming to the MB Corral in Wichita Falls on Friday night..

Me and several high-school friends had cars and money enough, so we decided to go hear him. And a fair amount of beer was involved. There was me and Billy Ray Johnson, and some others, and Tony Haberman. The music was good, we were listening to a famous singer, and for some foolish reason they were serving us beer there at the MB Corral.

So naturally I got a teensy bit tipsy, or maybe a tipsy teen topsy, or maybe I was actually just drunk, but I was able to navigate to the men’s room, once it dawned [Read more…]

Writing and Marketing

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Medford Oregon, January 23, 2016:  Two writer friends and I had coffee yesterday, because they wanted to talk about marketing their books. One of them has published a couple of books but his last one has not sold much yet. The other fellow is still working on his book. Both books are novels.

I confessed that although I’ve written several books and have published them in one way or another, I’m no big expert on this subject.

However, as the get-together unfolded, between my marketing experiences and their ideas we actually did put together a couple of plans that seem very likely to be effective.

I Read the News Today, Oh Boy

Today, I got an email from one of them, and in his email he said:

“All very interesting, and I want to know more, but my purist streak pulls me back to the Dark Side, to wit: Why don’t I just learn how to write a Story that makes a reader want to burn through it before lunch because I have made this huge promise and they are hungry for their payoff?”

As I began to respond to his question, it reawakened something I learned many years ago from my client Jerry Richardson, the author of “Powers of Persuasion,” which became a national best-seller, about how we humans leave out parts of sentences. I have found it very useful over the years. Perhaps you will find interesting this response to my writer friend —

Hi,

To answer your question —

You asked: “Why don’t I just learn how to write a Story that makes a reader want to burn through it before lunch because I have made this huge promise and they are hungry for their payoff?”

Errors of Omission

Your answer is inside your question. All English-speakers engage in a practice that linguists would call “omission” or “deletion.” We delete parts of the sentence because they are “understood.” An example: [Read more…]

An Implosion of Life and Love

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Medford, Oregon June 27, 2015 — Since she lost her vision, Susan has remained stand-offish, edgy, sometimes crying alone in her room. Coming to terms, but it’s hard. She doesn’t want comforting from me. Doesn’t want to be touched or held. Sometimes friendly; sometimes not exactly.

A few weeks ago near the beginning of the month, at the table she said we need to talk. You never really want to hear those words.

The story, made simple, is this: She said she didn’t want to be in a relationship any more. She says she feels like a different person. She says she finds it uncomfortable living in this house with me, as she doesn’t feel she has enough space of her own. I am “too big a personality.” I think that means too noisy, when I’m talking on the phone with clients, always present in the house for I work here. She says it’s too much for her current state of mind.

She’s going to move out just before July first. She’s paid her share of rent for June. Her daughter Saradevi has offered that Susan can live with her, and she’s going. Oddly, Saradevi has recently moved to the teeny-tiny town of Caspar, near Fort Bragg on the Mendocino coast, in a tiny house out in the middle of nowhere.

Since Susan’s catastrophe, which wiped out her artist work and her bookselling business, I have been focusing on my work, to get more clients and income, thinking how to increase our income, for she cannot work and her social-security check is small. But now it seems that’s not to matter much. I love her as intensely as ever. But she doesn’t want me to take care of her.

My belief up to this point was that we would spend the rest of our lives together.

And now, the plan has changed. [Read more…]

Susan’s Miracle

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May 15, 2015, Medford, Oregon — Standing outside her closed door, I could hear her sobbing, heart-rending, as beyond grief as the stars are hidden beyond a sky of lashing rain.

Today Susan, my sweetheart, has received a phone call, almost a death sentence. It was the doctor’s tests, come back, confirmation of her deepest fear: she is blind.

A few weeks ago in a different life, she caught the airplane to visit her sister Pammi in Arkansas. They had a wonderful time, catching up on laughter, held a “Soul Collage” class for a dozen women, visited a wonderful art museum. They’d hiked to see a beautiful waterfall; she was bitten by a couple of deer ticks, just another adventure. On the way back, she went through Vegas to visit a daughter, then returned to me and the dogs, in Medford.

The day following her return, she turned to me and said, “My vision is weird today. I’m seeing geometric shapes and flashes.”

The next day it was worse, and over the next four days, her vision just … [Read more…]

Dimensional Guidance

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Northern California, October 2011: Some folks — including some very serious physicists — think that there may exist multiple universes, perhaps an infinite number.

Dimensional Travel

by Sweetie187 under CC BY
Travel to Another Dimension

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In a way, these universes may all be here in the same space, but somehow vibrating at a different rate; and if that were true it might account for some folks reports of visiting “fairyland,” “hell,” “captured by aliens,” and other reports of non-terrestrial experiences.

According to some, and I personally suspect that it’s probably true, every time in your life that you have made a decision — left or right — that the universe split into two universes, and a *you* is in each one, and in one case the *you* turned left, and in the other one the *you* turned right.

If that is true, and the number of universes is infinite, then in one universe you are the Queen of England, and in another you live below a bridge on a freeway, and another you’re a movie star, and another you’re on death row.

One of my most productive mental self-help methods is to (in the “imagination”) walk through a doorway into another universe, where the Richard/Arthur has already solved the problem in question, and ask for advice. I call it “dimensional guidance,” and it’s proven to yield remarkably interesting and generally useful guidelines for solving the various problems I face.

It’s fun and helpful. Go figure.

 

 
 

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