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Spam. It used to be something gross in  a can. I ate my share in college because it was cheap. Now, of course, spam is what comes through your email and in comments on blogs. Ours dwindled for awhile after we found a plugin for  the check box that says, I am human.  But now spammers simply check the box and paste in their message.

Over the nearly four years we’ve had this blog, the tone of the spam messages have changed from hostile to complimentary to quizzical. I’ve collected some of the most amusing.

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This spammer at least has a sense of humor: Hello, i read your blog from time to time and i own a similar one and i was just curious if you get a lot of spam remarks? If so how do you prevent it, any plugin or anything you can recommend? I get so much lately it’s driving me insane so any support is very much appreciated.

This spammer apparently doesn’t realize that Howdy went out with John Wayne and those old westerns from the 1950s. Then again, wordpress must not know that, either. It’s the default for the greeting when you log in: Howdy! This post could not be written any better! Reading through this post reminds me of my old room mate! He always kept talking about this. I will forward this article to him. Pretty sure he will have a good read. Many thanks for sharing!

This guy needs some grammar lessons and you have to wonder about his “mission:” I am not sure where you’re getting your info, but good topic. I needs to spend some time learning much more or understanding more. Thanks for magnificent info I was looking for this info for my mission.

It sounds like this spammer was using a translation widget and that he/she may have some issues with a daughter:  You сan get definіtelу a great deal of particulars in thіѕ way tо thіnk about. That cοuld be a great lеνеl to bring uρ. I suρρly the іԁeas abоvе as normаl insρirаtion hoωеvеr сlearly you’ll discover questions just as the one you bring up the place the key factor will likely be getting sincere good faith. I don’t determine if finest practices have emerged around issues of these ranking, however I am sure that your particular job is clearly identified as an excellent game. Both youngsters think the impression of only a moment’s pleasure, for the entire content of their lives.

Another prankster: Hello there! Do you know if they make any plugins to protect against hackers? I’m kinda paranoid about losing everything I’ve worked hard on. Any suggestions.

Ah! An ex-English teacher commenting about spelling issues: Obviously like your web-site however you have to take a look at the spelling on several of your posts. Several of them are rife with spelling issues and I in finding it very troublesome to tell the reality however I will definitely come again again.

This one came from a psychic website and was on a political post. Go figure: WOW just what I was looking for. Came here by searching for tarot readings

This person was advertising  a treatment for panic attacks. I think he/she needs treatment for something. Hi! Quick question that’s entirely off topic. Do you know how to make your site mobile friendly? My blog looks weird when browsing from my apple iphone. I’m trying to find a theme or plugin that might be able to resolve this problem. If you have any recommendations, please share. With thanks!

OK, so who ARE these people?  Rob thinks they get paid a fee for each spam they post. But if the spam is never posted, how can they prove they posted it so they can get paid?  Could they be bots programmed to check the I am human box and paste in a message? Is there a programmer sitting in a dark room somewhere who hits a single button for, oh, say Ugg Boots, and the spam goes out to thousands of websites?

Sometimes, the tone of the spams are so similar I’m prompted to wonder if there’s a spam school these people attend, where spam teachers issue daily or weekly memos to guide their students.  Be kind, be critical, be complimentary, let ‘em rip.  I think there could be a novel somewhere in here.

This story comes from our blogging friend, Terri Patrick. It illustrates how an initial synchronicity can continue to evolve over time.

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In February 2009 I was new to blogging and used the word “synchronicity” in a post. I got a comment from Rob MacGregor that he didn’t see the synchronicity and he wondered why I used that word. He and his wife had recently started a blog on synchronicity because they were writing a book on the topic. Our online relationship has continued and since I was blogging to develop my Author Persona it was influenced by that first contact with Rob & Trish.

Morgan and I were barely acquainted in 2009 when we both attended a workshop on marketing for authors. We both had such a visceral reaction to the presentation we could read the other’s anger from across the room. So we hooked up and decided we’d put together a marketing presentation that was valid. We started meeting monthly and soon presented a short overview of marketing basics to our writing chapter. Attendees (many published authors) were stunned that this was such new information and requested a more in-depth workshop.

As we continued to develop our Author Marketing 101 message we learned the need was great and we should bring a business focus to our workshop so it could be more easily promoted to lots of other chapters and authors. Morgan and I also came to learn we shared a lot of things!

We are both from Cleveland, Ohio and now live in Portland, Oregon because of our professional focus – in the electronics industry. Our approach to business is rooted in the core value of helping others and giving freely. We share an “open hand” approach to life, but we aren’t afraid to close our hand if we feel abused or misused. Both of us were raised in households filled with faith, but also are willing to question and be open to energies and God’s infinite possibilities. Introspective and energy work are critical components of who we are and how we choose to travel through this plane of existence. Our stars complement each other, almost perfectly – kinda scary.

So in March of 2012, Morgan and I have been amazed at how our AM101-Author Persona message is expanding in only a year and has become so fun for us, and beneficial to our author friends. We were at an intimate writer conference in WA and chatting in a parking lot with a literary agent from NJ. She ruffled through the draft of our workbook and stated, “This looks very professional. You two need to build your platform.”

This is so obvious that Morgan and I are stunned. It’s a combination “Aha!”  “Of Course!” AND “How the (expletive) do we do that?” A platform is a Marketing 101 concept required for any professional service business. Our message is that a platform does not apply to Novelists –  they need an Author Persona. But a Platform does apply to us regarding our AM101 message about the Author Persona being the dynamic core of a novelist’s marketing plan.

Morgan and I had created a free blogspot site where we put our 7 primary AM101 points into static pages to reside forever available in cyber space. But we weren’t doing anything with that blog, it was just an electronic handout for our workshop.

But as I was initiating my Author Persona back in 2009, my connection with the MacGregors was because they were blogging to build their platform and write their book. Hence, in May of this year, Morgan and I started blogging 3x a week and that’s when synchronicities seemed to happen every week as we would be inspired for a new post, or recruit a Guest Post. Our workbook will now have better examples and be a greater benefit to authors. We’ll be working on it again after the new year.

Because Morgan and I pay attention to synchronicities beyond the potential for a good parking space, we appreciate being able to see layers of synchronicities that build on each other. And that – to me – is a HUGE deal because though synchronicity is flavored with magic and mystery, it’s also the foundation for what is practical and good business.

And now, our Author Marketing 101 message is just what Trish and Rob need now they are Indie publishing their extensive back list of novels. And I’m thrilled they came to me for advice on their marketing.

This one is great. These dancers range in age from 65 to 96.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&v=AeyO5m0sM3E&NR=1

Uh, these people don’t mess around!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=7N5OhNplEd4#!

I’ve been re-reading The Day After Roswell, Philip J Corso’s riveting account of the government’ coverup of Roswell – and everything else related to UFOs. It was published in 1997, became a  bestseller, and had a huge impact on the UFO field. Corso, after all, was a retired colonel, former Pentagon official, and a member of  Eisenhower’s National Security Council.

One of the chapters in Corso’s book is called “The Strategy.” It’s one of the best explanations we’ve found about how Roswell and everything that has transpired since then has been kept secretive for so long:

“Were you to search through every government document to find the declassified secrets of Roswell and the contact we maintained with the aliens who were visiting us before and have been doing so ever since, you would find code-named project after code-named project, each with its own file, security classification, military or government administration, oversight mechanism, some sort of budget, and even reports of highly classified documents. All of these projects were started to accomplish part of the same task: manage our ongoing relationship with the alien visitors  we discovered at Roswell. However, at each level, once the security had been breached for whatever reason – even by design – part of the secret was disclosed through declassification while the rest was dragged into a new classified project or moved to an existing one that had not been compromised.”

This stunning insight into how a government maintains secrets actually makes perfect sense. As a piece of one secret is uncovered, those in the know declassify the documents pertaining to that piece of the secret, then scramble to put the rest of the secret into a new little box with a new name and new classification. “For all the years after Roswell,” Corso wrote, “we weren’t just one step ahead of people wanting to know what really happened, we were a hundred steps ahead, a thousand, or even more. In fact, we never hid the truth from anybody, we just camouflaged it. It  was always there, people just didn’t know what to look for or recognize it for what it was when they found it. And they found it over and over again.”

Corso’s statements, of course, have been refuted by other experts.  John B. Alexander is one of those “experts.” In his book, UFOs: myths, conspiracies, and realities, he has a chapter called “The Corso Conudrum,” in which he details everything that’s wrong with Corso’s version of events. In fact, after the publication of Corso’s book, Alexander  wrote Corso a seven-page letter addressing the errors he’d found in the book. He includes it in an appendix in his book.

“…in The Day After Roswell,” Alexander wrote,  “Corso made many extraordinary claims, especially regarding the use of crashed UFO material in the development of American advanced technology. Unfortunately, none of those claims have been substantiated, and most are directly refuted by known facts.”

But skeptics and debunkers begin with an agenda and then attempt to prove they are right and everyone else is wrong.  But the facts seem to tell us that the official U.S. government MO for the last 65 years has been coverup, denial, and disinformation. If you doubt that the U.S. government has attempted to hide information or deceive the public about UFOs, drop by  a website called The Black Vault. Run by John Greenewald, Jr., The Black Vault includes more than 600,000 pages of declassified material released under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

For a government with an official stance that UFOs do not exist, it’s staggering to see how often the topic appears in official documents. In 2009, the CIA released multiple documents after a request was filed with the Defense Intelligence Agency. The 65 pages that were released, says Greenewald, “prove the CIA is still collecting intelligence in regards to UFOs, and that material from just the past few years is considered a threat to our national security.”

One document from the president’s Office of Science and Technology Policy labeled “UFO strategy” discusses efforts to curtail comments of UFO-related technology on so-called ‘open government blog’ sites created to attract ideas from the public. The UFO-related comments are categorized as fringe ideas and they were being removed from the main discussion. The staff members of the office discussed the irony of blocking UFO comments while promoting open public discussion. Even the New York Times had something to say about it.

“The New York Times, however, is reporting that while the Obama administration has asked the public for new ideas with the unveiling of an open-government website, the administration is considering steps to curtain free speech and discussion of the UFO issue on the prejudiced supposition that UFO subjects are somehow ‘fringe’ – the modern term for heresy, which was considered a crime against the church when Galileo published his findings in opposition to the conventional wisdom of his time.”

In browsing documents in The Black Vault, it quickly becomes obvious that the U.S. government is like a huge squid with so many tentacles that no single arm has the full information on UFOs, pretty much what Corso said in his book.  Each agency possesses bits and pieces of the puzzle and appears to be scrambling to uncover what the other agencies know – or don’t know. If that’s the case, and no one group holds all the information, how will disclosure ever happen?

But maybe  we’re reaching a tipping point in all this. A 2012 poll by the National Geographic Society  indicated that 36 percent of Americans – about 80 million people – believe that UFOs exist, 17 percent  don’t believe, and the rest are undecided.  The figure that is really intriguing is that 80 percent of the NGS survey believe the government is hiding information about UFOs. The current population of the U.S. stands at 314,826,000. Do the math.

Yet, even with the math, in the article about the NGS survey, a spokesman from the Skeptical Inquirer – Micheal Sherner – writes it all off as people like to believe in “weird things.”  Flippant. And not so different, really, from the way the government has handled things for all these decades. Hallucinations, weather balloons, the planet Venus. Uh-huh. Tell that to an abductee.

Recently, I have been thinking quite a bit about the nature of love. According to some spiritual experts, it’s the most powerful emotion in the known universe. It’s supposedly what you commit to when you get married, it’s what you feel when you have a child, and yes, it has allegedly been known to move mountains, although I haven’t yet found any scientific evidence of that. But here is what I have found. It is not strictly a human thing. It exists among dogs. It crosses species boundaries. It undoubtedly has a past life component.

Let’s start with the dogs. Maybe we’ll end there, too.

Three years ago, in November of 2009, we bought Noah, our golden retriever, from the South Florida Golden Retriever Rescue Center. He had spent most of his nine months in a crate, to be used as a stud. The people who owned him also owned his parents and when they ran into financial difficulties, they gave up all three dogs. So Noah, who was then called Presley, arrived at our home, he  was still groggy from his trip to the vet that morning where he was neutered. He wobbled into our kitchen with the woman from the rescue center, and instantly bonded with Rob. He was the same rich red color as our previous golden, Jessie, who had died a year earlier after her eleven-year run with our family.

From the start, Noah had issues. He was scared of everything and everyone, except for Rob, and later on, me.  One day, we went to the gym and left him for an hour in the house. When we returned, we discovered he had destroyed a couch cushion – I mean, he had decimated this sucker,  torn out the stuffing, reduced the cushion to history. We put him outside while we cleaned up the mess and seriously discussed returning him to the rescue organization.

But, we’re optimists. We kept him. And gradually, as he became more socialized through daily trips to the dog park and contact with humans who just wanted to love on him, he grew into the family. He still barked at our daughter, Megan, when she came home for visits,  but it seemed to be something about her exuberant energy that freaked him out – and her blond hair. Yes, I know they say that dogs don’t see in color, but I think a blonde haired woman had abused Noah in his previous home, perhaps with a newspaper. He used to be terrified of the newspaper, but Rob worked with him and now he bounds outside every morning to scoop it off the driveway and bring it inside. For a treat, of course.

After Megan graduated from college, she came home to live while she applied for jobs in her field and worked at various part-time jobs. In early September 2011,  she said, “Hey, Mom, let’s go look for a puppy. I would love to have a puppy.”

I am a total sucker for these words. My best animal companions have come from these random excursions. So Megan and I headed over to Big Dog Ranch and found a puppy that captured both of us.  They told us she was a border collie mixed with lab. Her DNA Internet test said she was  a Pomeranian mix. Never spend the $ for this test. Nika is obviously not a Pom. She’s  a Heinz 57, a Ketchup of border collie, lab, Australian cattle dog, Greyhound… whatever. For us, she is  the personification of unconditional love. She accepts you as you are, and your species doesn’t matter.

She also ended up with mange. It manifested itself at about four months, until Nika was as bald as a radish. Our wonderful vet prescribed Promeris and kept a close eye on her and now, at 16 months, she is mange free.

When Megan landed a Disney internship at Epcot working with dolphins, Nika stayed with us. She and Noah played together, ate together, slept together. Nine long and beautiful months. Then Megan’s internship ended in June 2012 and she started a dogwalking business and Nika moved to Orlando with Megan.

At least once a month, we visited Megan or she visited us or we met in Cassadaga and, of course we brought the dogs. Every time these two dogs were reunited, beautiful things happened. One time Megan pulled into a B&B near Cassadaga and Nika leaped out of the window of a moving car to get to Noah. Always, they seemed to pick up just where they had left off, just as we humans do, commiserating, planning, enjoying.

Megan and Nika were here for a week for Thanksgiving and both dogs were really in their element. After all, Obama had swept the election, the humans were optimistic, their lives were branching out in new directions, things were looking good. For Nika, who has become an urban apartment dog, it was a chance to go in and out whenever she wanted, For Noah, it was about Nika.

The relationship between these two is really indescribable. Both of the dogs accept our three cats – and vice versa. Cats aren’t the issue. The issue is separation.  Nika is clearly Megan’s dog, she is her human. But it’s equally clear that Nika loves her Noah and that Noah loves his Nika and…here we are. An impasse.

Love and its obstacles. And hey, it’s not like either of these dogs can act on whatever they’re feeling for each other. Both are neutered. This is some strange and wonderful soul connection, two dogs, three humans, and well, we’ll see. Nika mange free. Noah  is humanized.

Here’s Nika, navigating for Rob. Noah’s head is to the left of hers. If he could fit up here, too, he would be right next to her.

One day Raymond Moody, the famed psychiatrist who brought science to the near-death experience and wrote Life After Life, decided he needed a new place to live. He started looking for a larger house with some property in a rural setting. He would do his research and writing and he would have visitors for his unusual experiments involving mirrors. More on that in a bit.

He quickly found out that most of the houses in his area in Georgia were more expensive than he could afford. But he was told that if he looked across the border in Alabama 11 miles away,  he might have better luck. He soon found a beautiful Victorian house for sale set on two acres and went to the realtor’s office. The agent hesitated, as if he knew the house wasn’t quite right for Moody, then asked: “What are you really looking for?”

Although he liked the Victorian, what he really wanted was a Gristmill. He had wanted to live in a mill house since he was a young man and had visited one. “I had always kept that vision in my mind, and apparently I had it now because the realtor appeared to know I wanted something different from the Victorian house.”

The realtor nodded and said he would take him to one near where he lived. They drove through forest and fields, crossed an old wooden bridge and there was the gristmill on the edge of a broad, fast-flowing creek. It dated back to 1850. Moody fell in love with it, but the problem was that it wasn’t for sale.

The realtor knew the family and the grown children wanted the parents to move, but they were intent on staying. They’d lived there for decades. When he called he was told they weren’t interested in selling, but the couple said that he could show the house, anyhow.

When they arrived, Moody introduced himself to Mrs. Doerr. She replied, “Dr. Raymond Moody…Dr.Raymond Moody….are you the man who wrote that book?”

Before Moody could answer, she walked into the living room and pulled a book off the shelf. To his surprise, it wasn’t his book at all. Rather, it was a book by Dr. George Ritchie, a good freind to whom he’d dedicated Life After Life, and he had also written the foreword for Ritchie’s book. That was what the woman remembered.

“George Ritchie is one of our dear, dear firends,” she said. “I think this must be a sign.”

Moody in his autobiography, Paranormal, recalls. “The chances of finding a gristmill that someone was willing to sell was highly unlikely, but the idea that they would be connected to me in any way, let alone through my good friend George Ritchie, was beyond belief for me.”

Within a moon, he had moved into the home of his dreams. It was there that he set up his psychomanteum – a mirrored room where his patients would gaze while in a meditative state and many would make contact with deceased family members and friends.