Mystery pyramid built by newfound ancient culture in Mexico

An ancient pyramid located not far from Mexico City may be the product of a previously unknown pre-Colombian culture, according to National Geographic. 

Most of the 41 artifacts "do not fit into any of the known cultures of the Valley of Tulancingo, or the highlands of central Mexico,"said Carlos Hernández, an archaeologist at Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History in the central state of Hidalgo. .... Many of the figures are depicted in a sitting position, with their hands placed on their knees. Some have headdresses or conical hats with snakes at the base, which could represent Ehécatl-Quetzalcóatl, the Aztec god of the wind. One figure shows a man emerging from the jaws of a jaguar.

The sculptures are also made of flat stucco—a combination of fine sand, lime, and water—and painted blue or green to the give the appearance of jade. All of the artifacts date to the Epiclassic period between A.D. 600 to 900. ...

But by linking all the characteristics that make them different, [such as their location in Tulancingo and time period], allows us to say that they should be considered as a product of a different culture [called Huajomulco]....

The pyramid's proportions, along with smaller structures that were painted black and white, do not correspond to the Toltec or Teotihuacan cultures of the same area and time period.

I wonder how long it will be before people who have no clue will be talking about human sacrifice and calendars ending in conjunction with this new culture?

(Screenprint of original article)
12.19.15.16.10 13 Mac 3 Oc (burner day)

My father’s ghost

I had one of my rare dreams the other night—a dream that I am in (as me) and involving people and places that actually exist. It was a long and complicated dream and I’ll spare you the details. But as part of it, I was hanging around with a bunch of ghosts. Not scary ghosts going “whooo” and rattling chains, simply spirits of dead people. One of them was my dad. And at first (in the dream) it was cool to have my dad’s ghost around—not much different from having a flesh-and-blood Alzheimer’s dad—there but not there, you know?

But as I spent more time trying to communicate with my father’s ghost, I realized something horrible. Something that stayed with me when I woke up, even as the other details of the dream faded away.

My father’s ghost still had Alzheimer’s.

How unfair is that? In the dream, and now, awake, I raged against that. That is not how it is supposed to be. If you have dementia, when you die, you get everything back. You have to. You die and you go to the Elsewhere bar and have a drink. Whatever it was your soul was supposed to learn (or teach you) by stripping away your memories and your personality, you learn it and have a good chuckle, and then you hold the door for some newcomers (8 per hour, just from the US).

You don’t come back as a sad, demented ghost.

I don’t know what in my psyche triggered that dream and I can only hope that it was wrong.

(cross posted to my Alzheimer's blog)

12.19.15.16.9 12 Mac 2 Muluc

smart/lucky penguin

I was just at the failblog and saw this video. It's not in English so don't worry about turning the sound on.

Is this penguin lucky or smart? I think he's smart.

Mexican panoramic photo

I have Windows Vista now, so I used the automatic panoramic photo maker to combine all the pictures I took of El Rey in Cancun when I was there in January. The original photo spread is very large; click here to view. (hosted on Flickr)

forgetting?

I feel like I am forgetting my cats who are dead and it has me in a panic. I tried to list a bunch of things about them and I know I didn't get everything that made them special. But here are my lists; badly written but set in stone now.

• Zen was afraid of the dark, or of being smothered, because if you put him under the covers he would freak out.
• He didn't happy paw, but sometimes his paws would flex, very slightly.
• If something was on a table, he would knock it off with his paw and then sit where it had been. If Nutter was in a bed/basket, Zen would lay on top of him and Nutter would have to move or get out.
• If there was a piece of paper on the floor, he would sit on it.
• Zen slept on people, on pillows, anywhere in the bed, always purring really loudly.
• Zen would get out of bed in the middle of the night and go downstairs for whatever reason. Once down there he would start to howl because he couldn't find us. If we called him, he would run up the stairs and jump into bed, purring madly and cuddling, even though we had never moved, as if we'd left him alone for days.
• Zen loved milk so much that we couldn't even say the word. He would come running as if we had called his name. We had to call it "m".
• I would drape Zen across my shoulders, lion-tamer style, and walk around the house like that, and he would purr and be perfectly happy. When I sat at my computer desk, he would get between me and the chair back, wedge himself right in there, and go to sleep, forcing me to sit very still, leaned slightly forward, until he chose to move or until my husband came along to pick him up and move him.

I seem to remember more about Nutter, but he's only been gone 2 months (as of tomorrow). It always seemed to me that Zen was the more interesting cat of the two...so what I have forgotten about my black kitty?

• Nutter liked to be spanked.
• He liked to jump on people's shoulders and head butt them and butt-bump them, and if you held your arms out straight he would walk from one to the other.
• If he was happy to see you, or hungry, he would attack your feet and scratch at them madly. He did this to shoes with no feet in them sometimes too.
• He hated being picked up or held but loved to sprawl on a human. He would go completely boneless and sleep. Or he would suck on cloth and happy paw and purr. He would dig his claws into my shoulder, put his front feet on my cleavage and purr and go to sleep.
• When he was a kitten, first at the house, one night Willy rolled over onto him in his sleep. After that, Nutter was scared whenever anyone moved in the bed. He liked to sleep hugging feet, or on top of a person. He would also crawl under the covers sometimes.
• Nutter did a complicated food trick. First he would lead you to the corner where the food was kept. Then when you showed him two cans of food, he would sit on his hind legs and head butt the can he wanted. Then he would push the empty food bowl with his head to show you where the food went.
• He liked boxes and would squeeze himself into the smallest ones, even shoeboxes.
• We could not leave any loose threads anywhere. If we used a ragged quilt, Nutter would find the loose threads and chew on them obsessively. He also would eat curling ribbon, just gnawing at it and we'd pull a foot or more from his mouth, dripping with stomach fluids. Somehow he never ended up getting his intestines bound up from that bad habit.
• He would sometimes sit on top of the bird cages. The birds did not bother him, and vice-versa.

Tomorrow is the 1 year anniversary of my dad's death so I'm feeling very melancholy.

new 2012 movie?

Went to see the new James Bond film today and there was a trailer for a new movie about 2012. Basically it showed a monk high on a mountaintop (Tibet, presumably) ringing a giant gong with a log over & over, and the tag line was something like "how would government prepare 6 billion people for the end of the world?" and they show waves crashing over the Himalayan mountains and then it says "they don't".
And then the mysterious find out more, google search for 2012.
No movie address, no plot, nothing.
Here is my guess. I am going to have to go to see that movie in a theater where they don't know me, because I am probably going to get my butt thrown out if they start with the whole "Mayan calendar is ending!" "Mayan calendar predicts the world is ending" BS.

---

Oh yes, it's even worse than I thought. Here's the website.
Because it might change, here's a screenshot of the first page. Do you see the problem?
Yes, exactly. That is THE AZTEC CALENDAR STONE! ARGH. The Aztec didn't use the Long Count! Let's say that again, louder. THE AZTECS DID NOT USE THE LONG COUNT.
The center of the Aztec sun stone (shown in the screen shot) predicts THEIR end time, which is 4 Ollin (Caban in Mayan, or Earthquake). Not 4 Ahau (12-21-2012). In fact, because 4 Ollin comes around every 9 months, who knows when the world will end?
Here's the trailer:

If it doesn't show, here's the link to it on YouTube.
I'm sorry, I didn't think there was enough water in the world to overflow the Himalayas. Perhaps I have become STUPID in my dotage. I am 40 now, after all.
As I know more about this movie, which is sure to be a travesty since Roland Emmerich is working on it, I will post.
12.19.15.15.11 14 Ceh 10 Chuen

bye bye birdie :( (pets)

Onnie died around 3:30 as I was bringing her back to the vet.

Poor Onnie (pets)

My female perfect lorikeet is dying. Right now, as I write this.
This morning when I went to feed them, she was in the box. She came out, but she looked kind of puffy. I figured maybe she’d been sleeping. I fed them, she was eating popcorn all happy.
At five of 11, I was in my bathing suit, heading to the gym when I heard an awful “I’m being killed” racket from the bird room. Onnie’s head and right wing were stuck under the grate and she was having a seizure. I couldn’t lift the grate all the way because a perch was in the way but it took two hands to undo the perch, and one of them was holding the grate off her little tiny neck. Eventually I got her off the grate; she fell to the bottom of the cage (what we used to call the “basement” when Gwennie went down there). She was very still and I thought she was dead. Then she got up and found some popcorn and ate it. I changed my clothes like a lunatic, grabbed some popcorn, threw it in a bird carrier and went to get her. She was all limp and dead looking again but when I picked her up she was still alive. Her wings were all droopy. I called the vet and drove their like a maniac. She was eating popcorn the whole way. When I got there, I had to wait for about 15 minutes and I noticed there was blood all over the popcorn but I couldn’t tell from where. Turns out she bit her tongue half off. The vet said her wings weren’t broken and gave her some medicine and said she’d be okay. I wasn’t convinced but I brought her home. She climbed out of the carrier and right up into the perch forest.
I had to go swap a cord for my mom’s cell phone and when I got back she was in the corner, looking dead, barely breathing. If she was Lance (ie, if she liked me) I’d bring her with me in a towel while she left. But since she doesn’t like me I’m leaving her with her mate (who is indifferent to her suffering). She’s wrapped in a washcloth and I’ve got the heater positioned right near where she’s laying.
I feel so awful. I could rush her back to the vet, but he didn’t think she was dying, and he’s the expert. Obviously she was doing the fake perking up thing some animals do. So she’s there dying and I’m here writing and unhappy. That’s two birds and a cat in 5 weeks, plus a job.
When do the good things happen to balance this out?
12.19.15.14.13 16 Zac 5 Ben

Missing Zen and loving kitties (pets)

I missed Zenzen constantly, I think, from the moment the vet told me of his death until I got Sputz a year later. Now that Nutter’s gone too, the pair of them have receded, as if Nutter’s been gone two years also and not just a month. I think it’s because they were a unit, always together, best friends. I’m sad that Ursi and Sputz don’t love each other that much. They never sleep together, and play rough. I wonder if that is because Sputz bonded so much with Nutter, thinking Nut was his mommy, or because Ursi hated everyone for the first few months (and only now is figuring out we might not be planning to kill and eat her).
So this weekend I drank milk for the first time in several years. Zen loved milk so much we couldn’t even SAY the word around him. Then I started getting sick from milk and stopped drinking it. But now I don’t get sick anymore. Saturday I made chocolate chip cookies and drank a big glass of milk. Sputz was on the couch and I offered him the glass and said “milk” in the way I always said it for Zen, and this wave of longing for my smelly black kitty came over me and I’ve missed him for the past few days.
Could I have forgotten how much Zen loved milk? I mean, when Tom did his fake “got milk” commercial Zen was one of the stars! When’s the last time I thought about Zen’s poor little half-tongue, chopped up by two surgeries, and how he had to curl it sideways to drink? Or how bad he used to smell before his second surgery?
Turns out Sputz loves milk too, and drank it eagerly out of my glass. It did not make him sick. Ursi wasn’t around so I don’t know if she’ll drink it or not.
I remember how Nutter would roll over in his sleep to have him tummy rubbed, and how much he liked to be spanked, and to have his chin scratched. How Zen would sit and stare at me with such love, as if I was God and he was abashed in my presence. He would lie along the back of my chair, and gradually fall between me and the chair back, purring, fast asleep, happy to be near me. He slept on my head at night. Sputz sleeps on my head too, and I’m glad. For the year in between Zen and Sputz, I still slept toward the bottom of the bed, with my arm curled around the empty space where a cat should have been sleeping.
If Nutter was sleeping somewhere, Zen would try to lie there too, and end up pushing Nutter aside (or Nutter capitulated). If Zen was sleeping somewhere, Nutter would cuddle with him and they would hug each other in their sleep. Sputz and Ursi never sleep together. They don’t hang out. If Sputz is in the bed at night, Ursi sleeps in the dog bed on the floor, and vice versa. Very rarely, Sputz will be on the pillows and Ursi will be hugging my feet, but that’s the closest they come to sleeping together.
Ursi has been more cuddly lately, since we came home from Bermuda. Maybe 4 days without us taught her that she really DOES like us. She often gets in the bed with me while I’m writing and curls up nearby. Sometimes she curls against me. More rarely, she gets on me.
Saturday, after the cookies and milk were gone, Ursi came running down the stairs, howling as if she’d lost her best friend. We called to her and she ran over and got on the couch and laid half on the arm of the couch and half on Will’s legs (he was on his back, his legs up on the side of the couch). Eventually he moved her to be on his chest, and he petted her and rubbed her head, and she purred. But she is a weird little thing. Even when she’s happy she’s always got this grumpy look on her face. My friend (who has six or seven cats), says that Ursi is bitchy, and she is.
And of course the irony about Ursi is that Will picked her because she was the calmest, sweetest cat of the litter, and she was happy when he picked her up and cuddled her. He wanted her even when he thought she was a boy. (A boy with that face? She is such a girl. I can’t imagine a boy cat with her markings.) When the breeder called me and said there was a mistake and our chosen cat was actually female Willy didn’t care at all. And the little boy who lived there said that kitten was his favorite because she was “calm” and sweet. Something happened to drastically change her personality on the way home, that’s all I can think of, because when I brought her upstairs and took her out of the carrier she backed into a corner and hissed at me, all 2 pounds of her, and she’s pretty much hated me (and Sputz and Willy and Nutter) ever since. Except when she is hungry. Or when SHE wants to be cuddly.
A few weeks ago Sputz demonstrated that he learned how to fetch. He has two of these weird hedgehog toys, these little gray balls of fur with mechanical tails. If you pull the tail the toy goes across the floor. He carries them around in his mouth and brings them to bed. In the middle of the night I’ll wake up because he is pulling the tail over and over. I sewed one back together after he disemboweled it. And bought him another one after he completely ripped the tail off and lost it. If you throw the hedgehog, Sputz chases it and brings it back. He did it about a dozen times in a row.
Ursi’s love is for the laser. I had one that was purple (the case, not the light) and one of the cats stole it. We completely moved everything in the bedroom and never found it. So I bought a new one (blue, so if the purple one turned up I’d know it was a different one), When I pick it up, Sputz comes running to me and bats at the chain. Ursi comes running too (she knows the noise of the chain) but in her smart cookie way, she doesn’t come to me. She sits in the doorway and looks around on the floor for the light. She knows that when I have the blue thing in my hand the light is on the floor. That’s pretty intelligent. She never comes over to investigate the pointer itself.
I started out writing about Zen and how much I missed him and moved naturally, gradually, into talking about my new cats. I guess that’s right and proper. I can’t ever get Zen or Nutter back. I think sometimes, would I trade either of my cats to have my old cats again, back as kittens? No, something about that trade strikes me as wrong.
And now I’ve lost my Zeebo too, he who used to throw his food bowls and swear and yell “hey hey hey” (always three times) for attention. I was worried that Lancelot would keel over and die by himself, but he seems okay with the perfect lorikeets in the other half of the cage. The cage divider is up, and they haven’t fought once through the bars. I would take the divider out but I think that Hogan, who is a bully, might hurt Lancelot, who is a wimp, even though Lancelot is a lot bigger. The three of them were at the vet last week (I picked up Zeebo’s cremains in a lovely wooden box) and I asked Dr. Giddings how long they would live and he just laughed. I am going to be in a nursing home and still have Hogan, I just know it. He’s 16 or 17, in perfect feather and perfect health, has never been sick once since I got him in 1995 (used).
-12.19.15.14.12 15 Zac 4 Eb

Zeebo :(

Zeebo just died. I don't know what happened. I changed his paper and he was there, alive, I went to feed him and he was dead in his box. He was 15.
This is a picture of him being fed by his mama, who died in 1994, with his brood-mate who I called "yellow" because it was the only baby Scarlett and Lancelot ever had who had any yellow on it.
I wonder if any of Scarlett and Lance's 9 children are still alive. I guess I'll never know. Lance is 20 but now he's alone in the cage and he'll be very unhappy. He hated Zeebo but at least they were companions.

Religulous & thoughts on the afterlife & Nutter

Nutter is gone. :(
It turns out he never had cancer. He had a cyst in his lung. In September, it burst, flooding his chest with fluid so he couldn't breathe or eat. We had his chest drained and got him an appetitite stimulant, and he ate and seemed really happy and like his old self for a few days, but the fluid started to come back and he stopped eating again. He wouldn't even eat the Nutri-Cal paste that he loved so much. We brought him to the vet again and got the appetite stimulant but it didn't work. He was just lying on the floor crying. It was awful. So the next morning (Saturday 9-27) I sat down with him and told him he was going to see Zen by noon, and that we were taking him at 11:30. At 11:30 I was in the bathroom getting ready and Nutter walked into his carrier and looked at me as if to say "let's go."
He was down to 6 lbs from his top weight of around 11 (never a big or fat cat). He laid peacefully on the table at the vet and didn't flinch or cry out or struggle. I had my hand on him and he was gone between heart beats. He was ready to go but oh how I miss him and the silly things he did. The trick he did for food, the way he would meow at me without making noise (just opening his mouth), the way he would attack people's feet when he was happy to see them, how he liked to jump onto Willy's shoulder and headbutt his face...what a silly, goofy, boy our Fluffernutter the Wondercat was.
I lost my job the same week Nutter was so sick, and my last day was last week. So that's been really hard too. I hate not working, being home alone, having no money. If I had money, I could buy things to fix up the house with, to organize all our stuff, etc. But I'm trapped here, can't even go out to eat. All I can do is write.
I did got to the movies this week, to see Religulous, Bill Maher's documentary on religion. It was enlightening and it made me realize something.
When I think about the afterlife, there is no god there.
I see green fields and stone walls and trees and buildings and people and animals, but there's no god, no angels, no harps. No 72 virgins. No prize, no punishment. Just peace.
I see my dad in the Elsewhere bar, hanging out with everyone who had Alzheimer's and dementia in life, all their memories regained. It's a dark place, crowded, with the music a little too loud, and the door opens way too frequently to let someone new come in. The bartender isn't god, he's just whoever felt like pulling pints at that moment.
NaNoWriMo starts in a week or so. Beside looking for a job, that's my focus. And cleaning the house. Which I hate. So I'll be writing a lot! My NaNo blog is over at LiveJournal (I don't know why).

Portal to Mayan Underworld Found (Xibalba)

National Geographic has just put up an article on a Yucatan site which appears to match the myth of the Mesoamerican underworld.
The 14-cave site is filled with pyramids and temples. Researchers discovered a nearly 300-foot (90-meter) concrete road that ends at a column standing in front of a body of water.....Archaeologists excavating the temples and pyramids in the village of Tahtzibichen, in Mérida, the capital of Yucatán state, said the oldest item they found was a 1,900-year-old vessel....
"There are stones, huge columns, and sculptures of priests in the caves," said de Anda, whose team has been working on the Yucatán Peninsula for six months.
"There are also human remains and ceramics."
William Saturno, a Maya expert at Boston University, believes the maze of temples was built after the story....Saturno said the discovery of the temples underwater indicates the significant effort the Maya put into creating these portals.
In addition to plunging deep into the forest to reach the cave openings, Maya builders would have had to hold their breath and dive underwater to build some of the shrines and pyramids.

---

This brings to mind something I've been musing on for a long time. Across the world, across many cultures, there are stories of legendary lands and amazing otherwordly cities. Some of their names? Shamballa/Shambhala, Cibola, Xibalba and Shangri-La.
From Wikipedia (because I'm lazy), edited by me:

• In Tibetan Buddhist tradition, Shambhala is a mythical kingdom hidden somewhere beyond the snowpeaks of the Himalayas.
• Quivira and Cíbola are two of the fantastic Seven Cities of Gold existing only in a myth that originated around the year 1150 when the Moors conquered Mérida, Spain. Seven bishops who fled the city supposedly, in a far away land—a place unknown to the people of that time—the seven bishops had founded the cities of Cíbola and Quivira, cities filled with gold and riches. The Spanish looked for these cities in Mexico and the Southwest of the US.
• Xibalba is described in the Popol Vuh as a court below the surface of the Earth, associated with death.
• Shangri-La has become synonymous with any earthly paradise but particularly a mythical Himalayan utopia—a permanently happy land, isolated from the outside world. And apparently it is based on Shamballa, so in that respect, the connection I sense between all these places is true.

Now, I don't want to go all Fingerprints of the Gods on you, but isn't that kind of interesting? That the Spanish already were seeking a place called Cibola and found a people with an underworld called Xibalba (x is pronounced sh)?
(Image source, article screenshot)
12 19.15.10.19 2 Mol 9 Cauac assimilation

live blog: doomsday 2012 end of days

I am fairly certain that I saw this show, Doomsday 2012: The End of Days (it's part of the "decoding the past" series in History Channel) before and it made me scream at the TV. Now I will share my thoughts with you, as I watch. I will try not to scream or throw things.
Oh yes, this is the show that repeatedly says "Mayan calendar" while showing the Aztec calendar stone. That's some stellar research there. (And Daniel Pinchbeck is part of it. His 2012 book was so bad I couldn't finish it.)
Supposedly some kind of web-bot that scours the internet is also coming up with 2012 as a significant date. Hmm, could that be because there are SO MANY WEBSITES that mention it? The web-bots are predicting a minor nuclear war in 2008 or 2009, cumulating with something bigger in 2012. (This program came out in 2007.)
The Sibyl (an oracle from 600 AD), channeled Apollo, and claimed that the world would end after the year 2000. And since she predicted Hannibal, and Constantine, she much be right about the world ending, right? And she may also have predicted Jesus (perhaps that date was 600 BC?). But, like the oracle of Apollo at Delphi, the predictions were caused by poisonous hallucinogenic gas (ethylene), not the hand of a god.
So a few women, high on poisonous fumes, who never heard of the new world, managed to predict the end of the world in perfect agreement with a calendar they also never heard of? (and which isn't ending, don't forget that factoid).
They are back to the Mayan calendar being "more accurate than our own" (it's a count of days...so the Mayans could count? Good for them), although it probably is better at predicting eclipses.
Now they are saying the 2012 day is called "hunab ku" and that the calendar "predicted" white men arriving in 1519. How does a calendar predict? It's numbers on a page. My calendar predicts tomorrow will be Tuesday! OMG call the press!
Galactic alignment once per precession. Pinchbeck says it will cause a pole shift. They manage to imply that "geophysicists" agree that it will happen, but it's cleverly worded. I mean, Einstein believed it. Yes, he might have believed in the concept of a pole shift, but not the 2012 pole shift.
And of course, the I-Ching also has the exact 2012 date. Now I own several versions of the I-Ching and NONE of them has a date in it, or a calendar, or is correlated to a calendar or dates in any way. Spending way too much time on how the I-Ching works, without showing how the 2012 thing comes into it or what hexagram shows any link in any way to 2012.
Oh, here it is: Terrance McKenna made the I-Ching into a graph and then mapped it onto history and it "matched" if you put each of the 64 hexagrams 64 times and ended it on 12-21-2012. 64x64=4096. Is that supposed to be in years? Because they didn't explain it at all, just showed a graph and then moved onto Merlin (King Arthur's Merlin, yes).
I believe this is the point where I became so irate the last time I watched this that my husband came into the house from the yard and changed the channel.
They are talking about the "historical" Merlin, and that he predicted global warming and nuclear wars (written down 1135 AD from 5th century prophecies). Merlin wasn't a name, but a title meaning mad prophet (half crazy out in the woods). He predicted the state of Virginia, the battle of Waterloo, cell phones, Hitler and more, concluding global warming and a terrorist attack on London which kills 20,000, as well as an apparent pole shift. (Which they now nicely ascribe to the Mayan calendar definitely "predicting".)
Prophecies by Mother Shipton, said that when men could fly faster than birds and go underwater like fishes, half the world would be blood. But there is no proof that she ever even existed...although her fake predictions are being used to prop up the 2012 pole shift idea. (A journalist wrote them all in the 17th century.) She predicted women would wear pants and cut off their hair. (Ohh. Imagine that. No doubt that horrible event causes the pole shift).
And here we go, into "the most famous prophetic work of all time"--and no it's not Nostradamus--the Bible.
To quote Shakespeare, I say the Bible "is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
I really want to take these people who wrote this and crack their heads together. Every time they make a show like this, a combination of bad research, utter falsehoods, and sly insinuations, it make the whole 2012 end of the world concept explode.
The book of Revelation, of course, is really (nudge nudge) talking about 2012, right? Because the Egyptians also talked about it. (Wha-what? Where did that come from? Not from the first 44 minutes of this show, that's for sure.) The show says 666 was actually the Emperor Nero and the events of revelation are long over. So how exactly do they correlate to 2012?
It angers me that they make a flimsy case at the beginning of the show and by the end of the show those things are fact, written in stone. They bring up Black Elk and his Ghost Dance, and that he predicted after his people died out another doomsday would come for the rest of the world. Immediately after that, it's like he said "2012" in his prophecies. (I have read them, and I think he was a UFO abductee--he was taken up by the thunder people on a little cloud that took him very fast all over the world.)
Finally they move to the Hopi Prophecies: The seas rise, great quakes through the world, and the sun will get hotter, at the same time that a spiderweb device will criss-cross the world (The World Wide Web). And back to the Web-Bot Project, where the show began. Phrases connected to calendar dates came out of the Web-Bot Project in June 2001 for the next 60 to 90 days, which in hindsight pointed to 9-11-2001. And now the Web-Bot is looking at 2012, with phrases like sun, gamma ray burst, energy changes, etc.
Now that the show's over, I'm going to go into more detail on some of the information (from sources other than the show.)
I have always found the concept of a pole shift interesting. The book simply titled Pole Shift is very well written, and I've read it several times. It seems like right now the magnetic poles are wandering around. Here is a graphic from NASA showing its movement:


I couldn't find one that came closer in time, but this is certainly proof of its movement. Supposedly, the more the magnetic pole moves, the move likely it is the poles will shift.
There are 2 kinds of pole shifts. Sometimes the poles reverse--magnetic north moves to Antarctica, and south moves to the Arctic Circle. These are well-documented geologically.
The other kind of pole shift is the kind everyone is worrying about. That is when the skin of the earth slips across the molten layer it floats on. The north pole is still "up", but the land mass over it is no longer Canada or somewhere close to Canada. Maybe it's England, or Florida. This type of pole-shift (really more properly a crust shift) would be accompanied by all sorts of earth quakes, floods, and associated phenomena, and would kill many people. Lands that were temperate within a few hours will be plunged into an ice age, while tropical lands may end up somewhere temperate.
The Hope Prophecy is detailed quite well on this site, but of particular interest may be the pole shift interperation (same source as link): The Hopi also have prophesied that "Turtle Island could turn over two or three times and the oceans could join hands and meet the sky." This seems to be a prophecy of a "pole shift" -- a flipping, of the planet on its axis. The Hopi call this imminent condition -- and that of society today -- "Koyaanisqatsi", which means "world out of balance...a state of life that calls for another way. "
Now I hope that no one reading this believes that I think a pole shift is going to hit in 2012. They are simply two different subjects that interest me, that happen to intersect here.
--12 19.15.10.15 18 Yaxkin 5 Men Assimilation day

today is the 8th gate

Today (08/08/08) is the 8th gate in a series of 13, which began on January 1, 2001. Each of these gates brings in different energy. We have 13 months to integrate each surge (except after the penultimate gate) and adjust ourselves to our changing world.
The 12th gate is December 12, 2012, and the 13th is, of course, the first day of the 13th Baktun (12-21-2012) of the Mayan Long Count calendar. Although this day does NOT mark the end of the calendar (as many believe) or the end of the world (as many believe), it does mark a period of change, especially when one considers the galactic alignment of the Sun and the Milky Way at dawn (7:14 a.m., not 11:11-- 11:11 is the exact moment of the solstice, not the alignment).

2009 Jaguar Nights calendar going into production

Jaguar Nights 2009 is just about finished--one more round of editing and it goes to the printer.
Same quality, compact format as 2008, with a bigger front flap for readability. Mayan and Aztec calendar information, long count, 2012 countdown, and burners and portals, listed for every day.
Free postage within the US. Will ship mid to late August.

January 17, 2018

What is the significance of this date: January 17, 2018?
I don't know.
I was half asleep this morning, being harassed by one of my cats, and this sentence appeared from no where in my head: "On January 17, 2018, the cancer reoccurs."
Whose cancer? Literal cancer or figurative? I don't know. But it wasn't my thought, or my thought-voice, that put the sentence into my head. It's not a writing prompt. I have no idea.
It is also possible that the date was 2118. While this blog might still be up in 10 years (some of my old AOL stuff is hanging out online from 1997 and earlier!), I doubt it will be up in 110 years.
Still, I thought I'd record it and see if it rings a bell in anyone else's head.
The Mayan for that date is 13.0.5.2.13 11 Muan 11 Ben.
A Google search brings up nothing but empty calendars for that date.

famous crystal skulls are fakes

Less than three months after the Quai Branly Museum in Paris discovered that a crystal skull once proclaimed as a mystical Aztec masterpiece was a fake, it is now the turn of the British Museum and the Smithsonian Institution to find they were victims of skull-duggery.
I didn't know about the Paris thing, but it doesn't surprise me. More and more evidence has been pointing toward the skulls being "fake" as in, not of ancient manufacture.
What does that mean for the whole 12+1 skull reunion that is supposed to stop the 2012 end of the world scenario?
Well, constant readers know I have major problems with the whole 2012 thing. So I'm not at all surprised that something that should uphold it actually helps to shoot it down. You'd think, as an author who writes extensively about the Mayan and Aztec calendars that I would revel in the attention those subjects are getting because of 2012. It's a mixed blessing, actually, as I constantly have to defend myself for not "believing" in 2012 (much the same way I have to explain to Christians why I don't "believe" in Jesus).
Legend-lovers had a bad day on April 18 when the Quai Branly said it had found grooves and perforations in its 11-centimetre (4.4-inch) -high quartz skull revealing the use of "jewellery burrs and other modern tools."
.... Seeking the verdict of science, researchers from those two museums examined the skulls with electron microscopes, looking at tiny scratches and marks left by the carving implements.
These were then compared with the surfaces of a crystal goblet, rock crystal beads and dozens of greenstone jewels known to be of genuine Aztec or Mixtec origin.
The study appears in the Journal of Archaeological Science, published by the Elsevier group.
The skull in the British Museum, purchased in 1897, is made of transparent rock crystal and is 15 centimetres (six inches) high. The Smithsonian skull, acquired by the museum in 1992, is of white quartz and measures 25.5 cms (10 inches) in height.
None of the articles I've found mention the date the article was published in the JAS, and it's not on PubMed because it's not medical news. I will keep looking, and also try to find the April 18th source. Anyone who has links, please let me know (in a comment is fine)
(screenshot; photo source=article source)
12 19.15.8.14 17 Tzec 3 Ix

birthday

So, today is my 40th birthday. Not that anyone around me believes I am 40. It's kind of weird, because I don't believe I'm 40 either. And my rainbow lorikeet, Sir Lancelot the Loud Lorikeet, just turned 20, and in September I'll have had him for 20 years. Which is now half my lifetime. I didn't think about the relationship between my life and Lancelot's life until I woke up from having a dream this morning.
I was at a Wal-Mart, only it was huge, bigger than any one I've been to. I went into the pet section and I was looking at the fish. They were in aquariums the size of pools, more like going to Mystic Aquarium than shopping. I was admiring a really cool black moor goldfish who had huge fluttery eyelids, still thinking that every black moor I've ever bought died very quickly, when I noticed something in a nearby tank that didn't belong.
It was a parrot, trying to swim.
I ran and got someone with a ladder and convinced him to climb up and rescue the parrot before it drowned. He was really annoyed but he did it and gave me the bird. It was a rainbow lorikeet and it was half-drowned, wet and shivering. I tucked it into the front of my shirt and started walking around trying to find its cage and whoever was in charge of the pets section. The bird section was disgusting. Filthy, tiny cages, with clearly unhealthy birds in them. I did find an empty cage that might have belonged to the lory, but it wasn't labeled and like the others was too small and too dirty. I couldn't bear to put a shivering, half-dead bird into that cage.
So I decided to steal it.
I walked around the pet section and figured out where the security cameras were. I left the parrot in my shirt but didn't hold it so my hands were free, but the bird was visible if you were looking. When I found a dead spot (blocked by something) I tucked the bird out of sight and left the store.
When I got to the car my mom started yelling at me, what was I going to do with another bird, etc. I said that I had rescued it, it wasn't going to be near my birds because it might be sick, and I would rehabilitate it and find it a home. I tried to feed it some nacho cheese doritos (why I had them with me I don't know) and the bird was clearly starving. I was trying to think of how I could sell the bird without explaining that I had stolen it (which my mom didn't know). I decided to name it Braveheart, thinking it was a boy. Then I examined the bird (it was very tame, clearly hand-fed) and found that someone had given the bird a PIERCING through its left wing, a hoop that went between the wing bones somehow. Hanging among the feathers from this hoop were 2 or 3 "charms". I only remember one of them, a Venus symbol. From this I figured that the bird was really a girl, but I already named her Braveheart and clearly she liked it.
I got her home and started looking for a spare cage that I could keep in the kitchen. She was dry by then and sitting on me. Somehow I got it in my head that she was one of my babies from when I used to breed Lancelot and once that was there, there was no way I'd sell her or give her up, even though I've always said I don't want any more birds nor to start over again with a baby.
I don't remember much more than that.

12 19.15.8.13 16 Tzec 2 Ben Manifestation portal
(Venus image source; rainbow lorikeet source)

Mystery cave under Mexican pyramid

Archaeologists are currently excavating a cave under the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan outside of Mexico city.
The cave was originally found 30 years ago, but was closed up almost immediately, and the archaeologist who discovered died shortly afterward.
"We think it had a ritual purpose. Offerings were placed at the very end of the tunnel as part of the pyramid's construction process," Mexican archaeologist Alejandro Sarabia told Reuters.
"We want to find out why the Teotihuacan people sealed it and when," he said.
12.19.15.8.9 12 Tzec 11 Muluc
(screenprint; image source=article source)

North Pole now free of ice in the summer

Good news: the Northwest Passage is open.
Bad news: because the northern polar ice cap has melted. :(
Arctic sea ice could break apart completely at the North Pole this year, allowing ships to sail over the normally frozen top of the world.
The potential landmark thaw - the first time in human history the pole would be ice-free - is a stark sign of global warming....
Last year, the fabled Northwest Passage opened as Arctic ice retreated more than ever before.
Don't forget that Global Warming is a myth invented by Al Gore!
(screenprint)

Aztec death whistle blown

Someone is finally paying attention to musical instruments found at archaeological digs.
Scientists were fascinated by the ghostly find: a human skeleton buried in an Aztec temple with a clay, skull-shaped whistle in each bony hand.
Roberto Velazquez has devoted his career to recreating the forgotten sounds of his distant ancestors.
But no one blew into the noisemakers for nearly 15 years. When someone finally did, the shrill, windy screech made the spine tingle.
If death had a sound, this was it.
Roberto Velazquez believes the Aztecs played this mournful wail from the so-called Whistles of Death before they were sacrificed to the gods.
The 66-year-old mechanical engineer has devoted his career to recreating the sounds of his pre-Columbian ancestors, producing hundreds of replicas of whistles, flutes and wind instruments unearthed in Mexico's ruins.
....Medical doctors are interested too, believing the Aztecs may have used sound to treat illnesses.
Noisemakers made of clay, turkey feathers, sugar cane, frog skins and other natural materials were an integral part of pre-Columbian life, found at nearly every Mayan site.
The Aztecs sounded the low, foghorn hum of conch shells at the start of ceremonies and possibly during wars to communicate strategies. Hunters likely used animal-shaped ocarinas to produce throaty grunts that lured deer.
The modern-day archaeologists who came up with the term Whistles of Death believe they were meant to help the deceased journey into the underworld, while tribes are said to have emitted terrifying sounds to fend off enemies, much like high-tech crowd-control devices available today.
Experts also believe pre-Columbian tribes used some of the instruments to send the human brain into a dream state and treat certain illnesses. The ancient whistles could guide research into how rhythmic sounds alter heart rates and states of consciousness.
I think that's so awesome. If only we had some sheet music, or whatever the equivalent was. If someone from another time/place picked up a guitar, chances are they wouldn't be playing "Stairway to Heaven" on it. So even if the ancients COULD cure disease using these instruments, most likely it was discovered through generations of trial and error, and seems to me that's a lost art now.
I have a couple of CDs by a guy named Jorge Reyes who claims to make authentic pre-hispanic Mexican music. Only one seems to be still available, but it is worth checking out. I use them as background during rituals.
(screenprint)
12 19.15.8.5 8 Tzec 7 Chicchan manifestation portal

Montezuma's palace found (story)

Montezuma’s palace unearthed in Mexico!
Workers repairing a colonial era building in Mexico City (ie, a building built by the conquistadors on top of Tenochtitlan after they had destroyed it) were somehow amazed to find a bit of Tenochtitlan underneath.
During a routine renovation project on a Colonial-era building, experts uncovered pieces of a wall as well as a basalt floor believed to have been part of a dark room where Montezuma meditated, archaeology team leader Elsa Hernandez said Monday....
The Aztec constructions were razed by the Spanish, who built what is now Mexico City atop their ruins. Experts had long thought Montezuma's palace stood roughly on the site where the ruins were found, next door to the National Palace, Hernandez said.
Imagine that. It was just where they thought it was. Did they ever bother to LOOK?
The basalt floor likely belongs to the Casa Denegrida, or the Black House, which Spanish conquerors described as a windowless room painted in black, Hernandez said. The emperor was believed to have reflected there on visions recounted by professional seers and shamans.
That's pretty cool. I was supposed to open a business with a friend (now ex-friend) about 9 years ago and we were going to paint her root cellar black, pad the floor and use it for a meditation room. I guess I channeled that from ol' Monty, huh?
(screenshot)

12 19.15.7.6 9 Zotz 1 Cimi

Montezuma's palace found (video)

munay ki rites 7-9

Tonight I had the final 3 rites of Munay Ki. I had the 6th one a week or so ago, and nothing happened. I was disappointed, but it proved to me that I am not some great and holy person with amazing experiences every time I’m in ritual, or get some kind of rite/initiation/attunement.
I didn’t know what, if anything, to expect from rites 7, 8 and 9, which are given in a single session.
For rite 7, I was in a chair, like most of the other ones. Immediately I focused on my feet. I felt like they were growing into the floor, like they had roots. That led me inevitably to the Heartlight Wood. I stepped out of my tree and followed my path, to a cave. This cave was formed out of lava/obsidian. It was very black, shiny and flowing, and looked like a woman’s labia. I went inside the cave. It was filled with water, a glowing blue pool. I entered the pool and was greeted by a dolphin. Although she did not identify herself, I knew she was the spirit of Mother Earth. I expected her to have some kind of message for me, but she merely told me that I needed to swim in the glowing blue water. I was swimming like a mermaid, undulating, not thrashing around with arms and legs like humans swim. The water was exactly body temperature and neutral buoyancy. All of a sudden, the pool was a drop of water, with me still in it, and the drop was watering a tree (my tree, in the Heartlight Wood), and all of a sudden I started crying hysterically, convinced that my father had just been reborn. (The 6 month anniversary of his death was Monday.)
But I wasn’t sad. I felt a profound sense of release, relief and mostly gratitude. It was a good feeling.
For rite 8, I was on the massage table. My thoughts turned to aliens (I saw Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull over the weekend). It felt like thoughts were being put into my head, or my thoughts were being guided. I was thinking about the pyramids and all the structures which some believe were built by aliens. And I knew, like I know my eyes are green, that the aliens share the akashic records with us, and if you know how to access them, you can get the aliens’ knowledge without ever being in direct contact with them.
Then I was walking down a long square corridor, with all sorts of Egyptian-style hieroglyphs on the walls. At the end of the corridor, which I knew was underground, was Isis. She had her arms out, and they were winged. In each hand she had a fist-sized heart scarab. Around her neck was the vulture collar. Her head was elongated in the back like Nefertiti’s, and her eyes were big and slanted, like aliens’ eyes. She started to laugh when she saw me and said “don’t you remember that you wanted to be me when you grew up?” (I did! I used to try to dress like her and everything.) She told me this was a different entrance (different route) to the akashic records, and that sometimes knowledge looks different if you come on it from a different route or through a new source, even the same old information.
For the final rite, I was back in the chair. I was a fairy, sitting in the lotus position inside a purple flower. My elbows were resting on my knees and my chin on my hands. I was sitting on some kind of tuffet, like Miss Muffet. My hair was long, curly and silver, and hung to my butt, between my wings. Because my seat was raised, my wings weren’t being crushed. Around me were spikes of amethyst and quartz. I felt like I had been there for five minutes, or five hours, or five years, or long enough for the crystals to have grown up around me. Outside the flower was a field of other flowers. Some held meditating fairies like me. Bees and other insects and birds flew around, and various types of wildlife. I felt like I knew what every other creature was doing and had been doing and would do while I was in my flower, that all I had to do was extend my consciousness. But I didn’t feel the need. I felt totally connected to everything and yet, at the same time, isolated and protected.
At the end of the 3 rites, I did my Fire Ceremony. I gave everything to the fire, every negative emotion and feeling. I saw the emotions as pointy sharp things that cut me and hurt me. Then a great purple wing (owl? Angel?) swept across those sharp things and blurred them, like a chalk drawing. And I understood that nothing could erase the bad things, but that they could be blunted and softened so I couldn’t remember details and so the sharp edges wouldn’t hurt me anymore.
(image sources: heart scarab, vulture collar)

mystery of the crystal skulls on SciFi

("Live blogged" while I watched the show.)
Because of the hype for the upcoming Indiana Jones movie about crystal skulls, SciFi channel has a 1 hour special The Mystery of the Crystal Skull. Of course they tie it into 2012 (and John Major Jenkins makes an appearance) and hint that aliens carved them. They talk about the legend that there were 13 ancient skulls, and only 8 have been found. This show supposedly chronicles the search for the missing 5.
Of course the whole thing was started by the Mitchell-Hedges skull, and I've read in several places that the skull was planted for the daughter to find, if indeed it was ancient at all. It was found in Lubaantun in Belize--the photo is of Anna Mitchell-Hedges with the skull she found (source)--she died last year, and her husband Homann now has the skull and all her father's research information.
My thought is they were a type of really fancy talking stick, and I would simply love to believe they store information--after all, quartz is merely silicon dioxide and not any different than the silicon we have in our computers' memory. All quartz is piezoelectric, and that's not any special property this MH skull has and other pieces of quartz don't.
The show puts forth one theory, that aliens created the skulls and deposited them where ley-lines crossed, which is not unlike some of the crystal-burying ideas in the original version of Shamballa Multidimensional Healing.
John Major Jenkins believes that that the 13 skulls will activate on 2012 and save us from apocalypse.
So if they will activate automatically, why do they have to be found and correctly placed? If they are still where the aliens left them, why not leave them alone?
Homann goes back to Belize with maps and notes given to him by AMH to try to find the other 5 skulls. From a previous associate of AMH, Homann learns that Suki tok is the Mayan word for crystal, and supposedly a god descended from the sky (or from another dimension) and handed a crystal skull to an ordinary human. They learned to access the knowledge in that skull and from that made the other 12.
The MH skull is so finely carved that a facial reconstruction has been done on it (source--the reconstruction is on the left and the drawing is of a face seen during a meditation on the skull)--this wasn't in the show.
The Sci-fi team found large chunks of quartz within a mile from Lubaantun, where the MH skull was supposedly found (although, if you do research online on the various skulls, the quartz is thought to have come from Brazil). Then they headed to Uxbentun, a nearby unexcavated city, looking for a missing skull. Supposedly MH believed Lubaantun (and Tulum) were both port cities of Atlantis.
An author and former NASA employee, Richard Hoagland, claims there was an ancient civilization on Mars (face on mars); that Mars exploded, destroying the civilization on the moon. Left behind was a robotic head, which the astronauts who visited the moon brought back to earth. Somehow (not clear to me) this robot head is related to the crystal skull, and of course the government is covering it all up and denying that they are covering it up.
(My husband, watching the show with me, comments, "this guy is a crackpot.")
Next, after leaving Belize, Homann goes to Roatan (another place I've been) searching for a supposed second skull MH found there and later threw into the sea when authorities wouldn't let him take it from the island. For some reason, they chose to dive on a known wreck--would he have thrown his "treasure" onto an existing spot?
Then they show the skull "Max" whose owner travels with him, displaying him in a PVC pyramid on top of a colored light. Cool, yet kind of tacky. I am sure she has been around here with him; I seem to remember seeing some kind of flyer or invite at some time past.
The show goes back to Lubaantun, and Homann talks about bringing his wife AMH there, and that the pyramid where she found the skull isn't there anymore ("They took the top down or something") and that the pyramids were "different" from when she had been there in the 1920's. (How did they move?) Although there is proof that the skull was purchased by MH at Sotheby's in the 1940's, the refuting story is that MH had "loaned" it to the man who put it up for sales and forced MH to buy his own skull back.
A woman at the Smithsonian looked at the MH skull and said it had been carved with modern equipment and high-speed polishing tools, and it's clearly not pre-Columbian. Of course that's refuted too--the Atlanteans/aliens w ho carved it had, of course, high speed tools. So yes, it's one of the 13 ancient skulls, even though it was probably carved in the 19th century.
IMHO, the MH skull is still a gorgeous work of art, even if it's only 150 years old, not 1500+.
Edgar Cayce said that Atlantis ran on crystal power and that sent MH to Lubaantun, looking for crystals. (And magically, on her birthday, in a pyramid that no longer exists, his daughter found an amazing crystal skull. Although not one photo of that expedition has her in it, and no one else who wrote about that expedition wrote about her being there OR the skull being found...)
JMJ talks about 2012 and the earth lining up with the center of the galaxy. I just don't understand how, if he understands precession, that he can state any exact date related to it with any accuracy. So somehow they associate 2012 with Itzamna and the skull he is shown to carry, and the alignment will set off a pole shift, unless of course they are found, which JMJ says isn't necessary. (source of Itzamna)
In a very confusing twist, they return to Roatan, and change the story, saying that MH hid the other crystal skull in a cave in the nearby island of Helene (not thrown in the water, as they said earlier, so why did they bother to dive looking for it?). They have a 70 year old photo of the shoreline and another of the cave.
An elderly Mayan man says the MH skull belongs to Belize and should be displayed in a museum there, or at Lubaantun. Of course, if the skull was really ancient and was really found there, the elder is right. But if the story of finding it is a lie and it was created as a hoax in the 19th century, there is no history and no need to return it anywhere.
The explorers find the cave in the photos and find nothing, just like they found nothing in the water. They say it's because the skull is cursed, and is therefore protected, and that it "wants" to be there. (3 things contradicting each other)
The only 2 other skulls of the supposed 8 that exist they showed are Max and the tacky ugly one at the British Museum--except for a brief glimpse of 8 photos at the beginning of the show. (I can't even find a list of them online. Anyone else?) The explorers were supposedly searching for the other 5, but they haven't even found one, and they even say that the skulls don't have to be found for them to work in 2012. And of course, if the Mayans who created the whole 2012 thing (which my readers know I have serious doubts about) also created the skulls, or got them from aliens, and knew they would "activate" automatically and STOP anything from happening....why all the hype? Why a "prophecy" for something that isn't going to happen because there is already a solution in place?
Back in Belize, they head to a hidden secret Mayan ruin near Lubaantun. Local Mayans go to an altar here and do ceremonies. Legend says that a skull is hidden inside the pyramid. They don't find it, of course.

The couple of things that surprise me are that they show a brief view of a stella that supposedly will pinpoint the 2012 event by the sun, and that a legend says when an elder was dying, his/her knowledge was transmitted into a crystal skull and from that into a young apprentince. I had similar ideas in my NaNoWri novel The Ridden several years ago. I am thinking I should revisit it.
12 19.15.6.2 5 Zip 3 Ik

Munay Ki 5

I had the 5th Munay Ki rite last night, the so-called "Daykeeper's Rite", which isn't about daykeeping or calendars at all. It's about midwifery and nursing and nurturing and feminine energy. One other woman got the same rite with me.
I was sitting next to the massage table, and I kept getting images of a big jaguar-like cat, yellow with not many black spots, to my right, as if the cat was on (or in place of) the table. The cat's face would shift to a woman's face and back again. The cat told me to ask the person doing the rites about a certain black cat she used to have.
After I recieved the rites, I did a fire ceremony, which is a little ritual where you give your problems to a fire (a candle, in this case) and recieve something back. I didn't know what to give so I just offered everything. When I was taking in the candle's energy I felt led to bring it into various centers of my body with little affirmations. Into my forehead "so I can see the truth" into my throat "so I can speak the truth" into my heart "so I can love the truth" and into my belly "so I can feel the truth". Whatever "the truth" is.
As soon as the other woman was done with her fire ceremony and the sharing began, I asked about the cat: "Do you still have [cat's name]?" The cat in question was old and blind when I last saw him years ago and I was sure the answer would be "no, he died." Instead, she said he was 17 and she still had him, and he was her unconditional love cat. Of course my Zen-zen (also black) was my unconditional love kitty, so I thought of him for a moment and felt a little sad. But she was pretty amazed, wondering WHY I asked about that cat and not her other one. I told her about the jaguar-woman telling me to ask her. She found it really amazing, since the rite is about love that I asked about her "love" cat, and she felt that was a strong message.
Today is 12.19.15.5.17 0 Zip 11 Caban (earthquake); yesterday was 10 Cib (Vulture), a good karmic cleansing day, which is why I gave it all to the fire.

2012 episode of wife-swap looking for families

From: Danielle
Sent: Monday, May 12, 2008 11:22:40 AM
Subject: ABC TV Show Inquiry

Hello,


My name is Danielle Gervais. I'm a Casting Producer for ABC's
Primetime show, "Wife Swap." I hope you don't mind me contacting you,
but we're currently into our fourth season at the moment and we're
looking for unique and out-going families who would be interested in
sharing their lifestyles with another family. Specifically, we're
looking for families who believe in the Mayan calendar and are
currently preparing for December 21, 2012. I apologize if you've
already received a similar posting, but we still haven't found a
dynamic family preparing for 2012. Please feel free to forward this
email on to any families you think would be interested in taking part
in this experience, even if they're not necessarily preparing for the
year 2012, we still love hearing from families with unique
perspectives on life!

In case you are unfamiliar with the show, the premise of Wife Swap is
to take two different families and have the moms switch places to
experience how another family lives. Half of the week, mom lives the
life of the family she is staying with. After making her observations,
she introduces several "rule changes," where she implements rules and
activities that are important to her family. It's a positive
experience for people to not only learn but teach about other families
and other ways of life. Wife Swap airs on Disney owned ABC television
on Wednesdays at 8 pm- the family hour!

Requirements: Each family must consist of two parents and at least one
child between 7 and 17 and should reside in the continental U.S.
(There may be other children living in the home who are older or
younger than the required age, as long as one child is in the required
age range.)

Participating in the show is a very unique experience that can be life
changing for everyone. In addition, each family that tapes an episode
of Wife Swap receives $20,000 as compensation for their time. Anyone
who refers a family that appears on our program receives $1000 as a
'thank you' from us.

I appreciate you taking the time to read this email and I hope to hear
from you soon. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact
me! If you're interested in learning more, please include your contact
information.

Thank you for your time,

Danielle Gervais
Casting Producer, Wife Swap
Wifeswap.danielle@gmail.com
646-747-7956

The chemistry behind implants?

I was just listening to this song I like, in one of those repetitive moods where I listen to the same song obsessively. The song reminds me of sad times, but it doesn’t make me feel sad. But listening got me into a philosophical mood—which is better than a sad one, a more usual frame of mind when driving along that particular stretch of highway, the same route I used to take home from the nursing home where my dad died—I started thinking about love and the nature of love.

It seems to me that each relationship—romantic or otherwise—is entirely unique. What one feels for a given person can never be captured again with another—or even with that very person.

I’m not a drug user, but I know people who are. They say that the first high from a really addictive drug—heroin, meth, coke—is amazing and incredible and awesome. And it can never be duplicated, even if you waited 10 years before you tried that drug again.

I suspect it has to do with cell receptors getting used up or impeded in some permanent way every time you use the drug. (I’m no chemist.) Imagine a door with a thousand locks. You put in a thousand keys and open the door. But some of the keys stick, and you can’t take them out, so those locks break, and every time you open the door, less and less locks are available.

It made me wonder if there are love receptors. Are there broken keys stuck in people’s love receptors, making love feel old and stale, making love go away entirely? Do those stuck and broken keys impede us from feeling the rush of first love, of best friendship?

Some metaphysicians (myself included) talk about thought forms caught up in our auras. Some talk about implants. These implants or thought forms affect our behavior, influence our very lives. Are they simply keys stuck in our locks? Cell receptors so gunked up with hormones or whatever that they no longer accept input?

And if that’s what implants and thought forms really are—something chemical, something physical left behind in a cell—how can we really clear them?

(Written 04-22-08, 7 p.m., 12.19.15.4.16. 19 Pop 3 Cib)

Munay Ki 1-4

Last night I got the first 4 rites of Munay Ki. I haven’t read the book it’s based on--The Four Insights: Wisdom, Power, and Grace of the Earthkeepers (although I've read other excellent books by the author, Alberto Villoldo)--, nor did I read over much of the information sent to me beforehand. This isn’t laziness; the library hasn’t gotten a copy of the book available (I’ve been waiting for a month) and I consciously decided to go into this not knowing very much. That’s what I did with Shamballa Multidimensional Healing and it was the right thing to do then, and it seems right now.

I heard about Munay Ki last September, from a woman I met at a Lightworkers meeting in Massachusetts who was also at the Shamballa 12D training I took after my Shamballa Mastership. It sounded appealing, but it required a 3 hour drive (each way) once per week for….I think it was six weeks. Anyway, not very ecologically friendly nor very friendly to those who have jobs and can’t spend 6 hours on the road for a 1 hour class. I told her that when she scheduled sessions closer to my home, I’d take it. And I forwarded the email to a friend’s sister-in-law who does a lot of shamanic work. She did the drive and got the rites.

I was going to take the rites from her, in December, and then my dad died at the end of November and the timing seemed off. Plus she was going to charge me a lot more (although the drive would be more like an hour each way rather than 3) than the original email’s offer—she was going to charge by the hour as if I was going to her for a Reiki session and she charged way more than I do, for instance, for such a session.

So I left Munay Ki on hold and went on with my life for a few months.

Then a friend of mine, that I’ve done many energy/teaching exchanges with, sent me an email saying that she was offering them. Basically she just threw a bunch of dates out there; anyone interested could pick a few dates and come get the rites. She does various rites all in the same session. I thought that was pretty interesting, so I signed up.

I haven’t seen this particular friend in a couple of years. She had a lot of strife in her life, and she had no time and we just kind of drew apart. Even though she lives just over the line in the next town, maybe 10 minutes away if I hit every light, we hadn’t gotten together.

She had 2 other people getting rite 6. She did them first, let me watch, and then they left and I stayed for about 90 minutes, getting rites 1-4 and some basic instruction.

My experiences:

Rite 1 was supposed to be “bands of color” put into my aura. I had to stand up. My knee hurt. I experienced it as someone wrapping me like a mummy, very securely, but more like a hug than a restraint. The “bands” of color wrapped, crossed, did this flippy thing where they crossed (not of these dimensions), wrapped, crossed, flipped, etc from my feet to my head. The bands were black silk. Very interesting.

Rites 2 & 3 were together, while I was sitting down on a stool. I did not know where one ended and the next one began. At first all I could think about was fluorite. I saw purple and white banded fluorite donuts and polished chips. Then they changed color to the blue-green that Beth and I love. The blue-green fluorite started morphing between cubes and octahedrons just like it does in nature as it grows. Finally the cube form turned into a small cluster of cubes like a city (like you see sometimes in pyrite). When she moved in front of me, I felt a waterfall pour from the wall above my head in front of me (behind her), which poured toward the floor but then leapt up and into my chest, like a sine wave. She was blowing into my hands and even though I could feel her soft cheeks against my fingers it felt like she was pouring water into my hands.

The 4^th rite was done while I was on her Reiki table. My attention was on my left knee, the one I hurt in Mexico. A ball of light surrounded it. Inside was a storm of pearly red light, like a fire opal. As she continued to do the rite, the fire opal color changed to a rainbow colored lattice, like the flower of life merkaba ball used in Holographic Sound Healing. Then the rainbow turned into a pure white light but somehow it was also platinum, silver, and white gold at the same time, and then the rite ended.

I think I might have interrupted the ending of the rite because I asked that my friend do a couple of minutes of energy work on that knee. I knew that it needed to be “sealed” somehow, and after only a couple of minutes the white ball went away and I knew it was finished.

She then decided she wanted to do a tapping routine with me, to lessen the pain in my knee. I wish she hadn’t chosen that route; now I won’t know if the tapping or the rites are what affected my knee.

Because my knee is better. The pain has greatly reduced. I am still limping, but that’s because my muscles have been trained to walk that way since January. The physical therapy I’m about to start will help that.

The tapping routine is complicated, but she gave me the paperwork on how to do it, and I’ll post that here when I have time to retype it. )

Munay-Ki official web site; FOL image adapted from here.

Happy Birthday Sputz

My skinny little kitten is a big boy now, a whole year old! He weighed 4 pounds when I got him at 4 months old and now he's around 18 lbs (pictures show him at 3 months and 11 months). But he's not fat. He's got a completely different body structure than Nutter. For instance, the space between Nutter's hipbones (how wide his back is) is about 2 of my fingers. Sputz's (and Ursi's) are the width of my hand. They have very wide bodies and their legs are kind of short for their size. They are what you would call "sturdy" in build. My best friend said that if my ragdolls were little boys, they would wear "husky" sized clothes.
Nutter has a bad cold. I know I should take him to the vet, but he'll get that awful pink stuff, and I'll have to catch him twice a day and jam it down his throat. He hates being picked up or held (always has) and forcing medicine into him doesn't make that any better.
When I came home yesterday he had a huge plug of dried mucus in one nostril. He was frantically licking his nose over and over trying to dislodge his, breath wheezing. I had to catch him and pry the chunk out. Did he appreciate that? No. He refused to eat supper. He sat there and yelled at me. I put down the food. He looked at it and yelled for food again. Will got him to eat some when he came home.
Nutter's so very thin. He probably doesn't weigh 8 lbs. But he is in good spirits, very lovable, loves the ragdolls (as you can see in the picture), loves us. He tries to play with the other cats, running around with them, and then he can't breathe, and he gets kind of bug-eyed trying to get air, and I feel terrible because I can't help him. I tell him he's 14 1/2 years old and he's got 1 lung and cancer and he can't run around like a kitten anymore.
I downloaded all the pictures and words from my old pets blog. Yahoo keeps promising a tool that will let us move our blog contents, including comments, in one step, to any blogging platform. I'm waiting. Not that I have many comments that I care about, but it will be a pain to rebuild something like 75 posts.
BTW, the picture of Nutter and Sputz is on the PetPlace website. It is slide 12 under "friendly cats."