1 to 5 stars

Posted on January 18, 2018 by Trish and Rob

Our daughter is a huge fan of the Netflix original series Black Mirror. The weekend we visited her, we set up a projector outside in the chilly January air and watched several episodes around a bonfire, with the image projected onto a sheet that covered a storage shed. It worked surprisingly well.

Black Mirror is a weird series, no question. Each story has to do with some aspect of technology. The society is sometimes futuristic or it’s like where we live now, but enhanced by some aspect of technology. Different characters for each episode, but there’s usually some underlying connection among them.

One of my favorites is from season 3, an episode called Nosedive. From Wikipedia’s summary: In a society where one’s social rating with others greatly influences one’s life, a woman tries to improve her own rating to afford an ideal apartment by giving an appealing speech at her best friend’s wedding. This summary really doesn’t do the episode justice.

The social rating is done through your smart phone and special contacts you wear. Any interaction you have with someone else – a waiter in a restaurant, some random person you bump into on the street, a co-worker, lover, boss – is rated from 1 to 5. Thanks to your contacts, you can see another person’s name and rating when you look at him or her.

In this society, the happier you are – even if it’s phony happiness – will usually win you a bunch of good stars from others. If you’ve got 4.5 stars and above, you’re entitled to special perks – discounts on car rentals, the best seats on airlines, stellar credit that enables you to get into the best apartments and jobs.

Without that 4.5 rating, you’re less than perfect, those perks are denied you, and you’re always striving to increase your rating and, thus, improve your life. In some ways, it’s a lot like Instagram – post the pasta dish you had for dinner, a cute picture of your dog, and people out there in rating land people give you between 1 to 5 stars and your social standing either rises or plummets. Get engaged to a 4.8 and wow, the 5 stars pour in.

Yeah, it sounds ridiculous and the hilarious story line really underscores that absurdity. But the bigger picture is unsettling. Take a look at the Amazon review process for books. Love the book? Give it a 5 star. Hate it? 1 star. Somewhere in between? Then it gets a 2, 3, or 4.

Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury, for instance, has over 1500 reviews in the first 5 days since it was published and a star rating of 4.6 Impressive. In the Nosedive world, he would be getting all the perks. (Wolff’s book, as of Jan 17, is the bestselling book worldwide in any genre, has been bought for 7 figures for a TV movie, and has sold to 32 countries. Definitely 5 stars in my book!)

IMDB is the same way. Take a look at Rotten Tomato ratings for movies.

When you buy a product online, you later receive an email asking you to rate your experience. Sometimes, the rating system runs from 1-10, sometimes from 1 to 5, just like the world in Nosedive.

In this world, the social rating system also bears eerie similarities to Instagram. How many likes can you get on your most recent post? How many followers do you have? Or, take Twitter. Obama has 97.4 million followers. Trump has 43.8 million (but don’t tell him Obama has more!) Oprah has 41,091,818. Here’s the top list.

 By the end of this episode, the woman’s rating has plunged from a 4.2 to a lousy 1.something, her life is in tatters, and she ends up in jail, where she is suddenly free to express herself emotionally. She’s not happy and neither is the guy in the cell across from her. The episode ends with the two of them shouting insults at each other.

In many ways, we seem to be living in this absurdity now, addicted to our cell phones, those mini-computers we carry around in our pockets and handbags, rating our experiences with books, movies, purchases. Will we soon be rating each other?

 

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Another Springsteen Synchro

Posted on January 16, 2018 by Trish and Rob

Bruce – reading from his autobiography

Trish and I heard a good synchronicity today that involves Bruce Springsteen. Those of you have read our blog over the years might remember our posts on Springsteen about encountering the world’s most famous Bruce in our gym. He lives here in Wellington in the winter. He actually  owned two houses here right next to each other. He can afford it!

So a friend, Neil, today told us of his encounter with Springsteen, and we immediately recognized it as a good synchro. He had mentioned that there would be a Springsteen Tribute band playing tonight at our local amphitheater. Trish said it would be really cool if Springsteen himself showed up…and hopefully took to the stage.

Neil grinned and said  that a couple of winters ago he was driving along with the top of is car down,  a Springsteen song blasting from  the radio. He stopped at a light, looked over and there was Bruce, smiling. He lowered his window, leaned out, and called to Neil:  “You like that music?”

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You’re Fired – and what the trickster says about trump

Posted on January 14, 2018 by Trish and Rob

 

I never watched The Apprentice. But like most people, I know that it was the show where trump ruled like a king and found enormous satisfaction in telling people, “You’re fired.”

Some days when I can actually bring myself to look at him on the news, it’s apparent he has brought that Apprentice persona with him. Or maybe it’s just who he actually is, the boss man/president/ dictator who has fired a number of people in his administration since he took office.

But as our friend Evan Cooke pointed out, it took the House Judiciary Committee more than 9 months later to charge Nixon with obstruction of justice. Less than 2 weeks after that, on August 8, 1974, Nixon resigned.

But perhaps trump should read up on the trickster. Joseph Campbell considered the trickster one of the most significant figures in Native American folklore. It “represents this power of the dynamic of the total psyche to overthrow programs… the trickster is an upsetting factor,” Campbell wrote, “…he breaks through….”

What trump has “broken through” is the decorum of civilized society, the way people talk to each other, treat each other, the empathy of being human. All of that has been shattered under trump. Bottom line: Putin and other dictators are my idols. I will get richer as prez. All you fools who voted for me, well, sorry, my promises were just reality TV.

The  trickster  enjoys bringing stuff full circle. So the “you’re fired” dude may himself face “you’re fired” if he crosses that line called firing Mueller. Then again, the trickster may have other more nefarious plans for trump. We’ll just have to wait and see.

 

 

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Sue Grafton

Posted on January 12, 2018 by Trish and Rob

On December 29, 2017, I received an email from our blogging friend Lauren Raine, an artist in Tucson, Arizona.

“I read this story in Facebook today and thought it might be of interest to you.

“Sue Grafton was  a facebook friend, I didn’t know her,  but I enjoyed her posts.  Apparently she was also a successful author….perhaps you know of her?

“On the 19th of December she posted about a trunk that someone in North Carolina had sent to her, a stranger who found her out because the truck had things from 100 years ago that apparently belonged to her grandmother, and grandfather.  Sue took photos of all of it and describes the story in her post of the 19th.

“Then today I saw a post from her daughter that she had passed away yesterday suddenly.  Reading the story of the trunk, I just couldn’t help but feel there was spirit contact there……just 10 days before her death she was gifted with beautiful art and handmade quilts that belonged to her grandparents!   And so of course I thought of you folks!

“So here is the link to Sue’s post. If you can’t access it let me know and I”ll copy it for you.

“Wishing you and yours a wonderful New Year!”

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The news about Grafton’s death was a surprise – and sad. Back in the mid to late 1980s, sometime after my first novel, In Shadow had been published by Ballantine, I received a letter from Sue. This was in the days before the Internet, so it was an actual letter. She told me how much she’d enjoyed the book, then said a rather odd thing about my use of the words “safety deposit box.” She thought the term should be “safe deposit box.”

I thought it was an odd observation and now, thanks to Google, I find that both usages are true. But back then, I figured my usage was probably true for Florida and not necessarily true for the rest of the world.

Several years later, I met Sue in person at a writers conference – maybe Bouchercon, I’m not sure – and she apologized for her criticism. Right there and then, I liked her, a Taurus who had conceived of a sassy, female private eye and made it work for her in a major way, as only a persevering Taurus can do.

She nearly made it to the end of the alphabet. As her daughter put it in a Facebook post:

Hello Dear Readers. This is Sue’s daughter, Jamie. I am sorry to tell you all that Sue passed away last night after a two year battle with cancer. She was surrounded by family, including her devoted and adoring husband Steve. Although we knew this was coming, it was unexpected and fast. She had been fine up until just a few days ago, and then things moved quickly. Sue always said that she would continue writing as long as she had the juice. Many of you also know that she was adamant that her books would never be turned into movies or TV shows, and in that same vein, she would never allow a ghost writer to write in her name. Because of all of those things, and out of the deep abiding love and respect for our dear sweet Sue, as far as we in the family are concerned, the alphabet now ends at Y.

 I do think Lauren may be right about the spirit contact aspect here.

RIP, Sue. Now hurry up and get back here to stir up the status quo again! And thank you for the beautiful fan letter!

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A Synchro Weekend

Posted on January 10, 2018 by Trish and Rob

Frances McDormand…Three Billboards

Whenever Trish and I travel and get out of our usual routines, it seems the synchronicities bubble to the surface. That was definitely the case on the first weekend of January when we visited our daughter in Orlando, and Trish held an astrology workshop in the spiritualist community of Cassadaga, located 35 miles northeast of the city. Trish only knew that two or three people had signed up for the workshop, so she was surprised when 14 people showed up.

After returning to Orlando from the workshop, we decided to go to a movie with our daughter and that’s when the synchronicities began. Megan initially wanted to see The Greatest Showman, but Trish and I aren’t into musicals so we decided to go to an arts theater and see The Shape of Water. But the timing was wrong and the distance too far, so we settled on seeing Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri at a theater in nearby Winter Park. Megan had already seen it and assured us it was a really good movie—in spite of the title.

She was right. We thought the story was startling, dramatic and humorous with a very unHollywood-like ending. The acting by Francis McDormand, Sam Rockwell, and Kerry Condon was superb and Woody Harrelson was his usual intriguing self. Before we left for the movie, Megan had wanted to record the Golden Globe awards, but had problems with her DVR and was able to do it.

So on the way home from dinner and the movie, she Googled the awards and we were amazed (yet not surprised) to find out that the script of Three Billboards won the Best Screenplay Award. The award was actually given while we were watching the movie. By the time we got home, we’d found out that Frances McDormand won the Best Actress Award and Sam Rockwell won Best Supporting Actor, and to top it off, the movie won the Best Drama Motion Picture Award. So, yeah, we picked the right movie to see that night.

Maybe that synchronicity cued us up for the startling one that would follow the next morning. As we were getting ready for the return trip, Trish received an e-mail from author Whitley Strieber. Incredibly, he asked her if we’d ever heard of the spiritualist town of Cassadaga, Florida. He said he would be visiting there within the coming two weeks to meet with someone who had some sort of mysterious project in mind. He asked if we wanted to get together with him for a lunch, if we lived somewhere within striking distance.

Of course, Trish replied that we not only knew of the place, but were there the day before. We warned Whitley that the Cassadaga Hotel is haunted and the beds are hard, and suggested that he might want to stay at a nearby b&b. But he wrote back that in spite of the hard beds, he felt that the spooky hotel was where he should stay. Trish told him that we’d been scared out of our wits years ago while staying in a room at the top of the stairs to the left. He responded awhile later that he was booked in Room 38, which is at the top of the stairs to the left!

We’ve known Whitley for years, mainly through our numerous appearances on his Unknown Country podcast and e-mail exchanges. But this will be the first time that we’ll meet him in person. So already we’re looking forward to a return trip to Cassadaga sooner rather than later.

An hour or so later, we headed back to South Florida, getting onto the always hectic I-4. We’d barely gone a couple of miles when we noticed an oval-shaped object on the horizon in the distance, several miles away. We quickly recognized it as a blimp. We continued on, existed I-4 after several miles and entered the Florida Turnpike. That’s when we saw the blimp again. Now closer. As we drove on, we seemed to be heading toward the blimp and the blimp seemed to be heading toward us. We could read, GOODYEAR, clearly on the side of the blimp and it came so close we thought we could see people in the windows of the carriage at the bottom.

Amazingly, as the blimp reached the turnpike, it was heading in the same direction we were moving and passed right overhead. For a couple of minutes, we lost site of it, because it was above us. Then the road turned and the blimp came back into view on the opposite side of the turnpike. We took it as another sign—a Good Year ahead!

As if to top it off, Trish bought a lotto ticket while in Orlando and won $100. A great weekend of interesting synchros!

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Cluster Synchronicities in Filming of IT

Posted on January 8, 2018 by Trish and Rob

IT is one of the longest of Stephen King’s novel and one of the strangest. We watched the 2017 movie version when our daughter, Megan, was home over the holidays. During the movie, we frequently referenced The Stephen King Illustrated Companion, a Christmas gift Megan gave me, and discovered that the seed for this story was planted when King was working on The Stand.

He and his family were living in Boulder, Colorado then and their car, an AMC Matador, needed to be picked up at the garage where it was being repaired. Rather than calling a cab, King decided to walk the three miles to the dealership. He eventually ended up on a narrow, unlit road at twilight.

“I was aware of how alone I was. About a quarter of a mile along this road was a wooden bridge, humped and oddly quaint, spanning a stream,” he wrote in a Book-of-the-Month Clun News in 1986. I walked across it. I was wearing cowboy boots with rundown heels, and I was very aware of the sound they made on the boards; they sounded like a hollow click.”

Instead of thinking about the character from The Stand in whose life he was wrapped up at the time, he thought of the story of Billy Goats Gruff, the troll who says, “Whose that trip-trapping on my bridge?” From that point, the entire story “just bounced into my mind on a pogo-stick.” And it wasn’t just the characters that he got, but the “split time frame, the accelerated bounces that would end in a complete breakdown, which might result in a feeling of ‘no time,’ all the monsters that were one monster…the troll under the bridge, of course.”

In an interview with Douglas E Winter in The Art of Darkness, (NAL, 1984), King said, “The book is the summation of everything I have done and learned in my whole life to this point. Every monster that ever lived is in this book.”

King was 37 years old.

In the story, the number 27 appears frequently. So here are some synchros: This film was released 27 years after the original 1990 television mini-series. In the book, it is mentioned that “It” returns to Derry approximately every 27 years. Jonathan Brandis, who played young Bill in the original IT film, died at the age of 27. The movie was released a month after the 27th birthday of Bill Skarsgård, who played Pennywise the clown. The official US release date was 9/8/2017. 9+8+2+0+1+7 = 27.

As a writer, I’m intrigued by King’s use of multiple viewpoints in the novel – 7 altogether, and we see these viewpoints when the characters are kids, and when they’re adults. But in this version of IT the movie, everything is told from the kids’ point of view. In the planned sequel, the story will be told by their adult selves 27 years later.

 

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Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House

Posted on January 6, 2018 by Trish and Rob

Journalist Michael Wolff has written a stunner in Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House. I first heard about it when people on CNN and MSNBC started reading excerpts from it a couple of days ago. They’d gotten early copies. Then the news reported that trump’s attorneys had sent cease and desist letters to Wolff and his publisher, Henry Holt, to stop publication of the book.

And I thought, Huh? Really? The president of the U.S. is trying to stop the publication of a book? To trample the first amendment? It felt like Fahrenheit 451, like Nazi Germany’s legendary book burnings. It felt WRONG. BAD. Like Fascism.

The publisher ignored the cease and desist and brought the book out four days early – on January 5 instead of January 9. I ordered my ebook on the evening of January 4, but Amazon apparently couldn’t keep up with the fluctuations and it was scheduled to get to my Kindle app on January 9. I cancelled the order. Then this morning, I checked Amazon again and the book was available for download.

When I downloaded the book, it had 13 reviews. Tonight, there are over 400 reviews. Wow.

What’s fascinating about the book is that after trump won, Wolff basically parked himself on a couch in the West Wing and interviewed staffers and people who moved through the area. The white house was so chaotic that no one told him to move on or that he couldn’t be there. trump himself gave a sort of carte blanche to Wolff because, after all, trump apparently doesn’t read and so what if this guy wanted to write a book?

What Wolff depicts is what sane people have observed 24/7 in the last year – an administration in total chaos,  a narcissistic president more concerned about his public image – his brand – than in governing. A man so childish that he requires handlers who struggle to mitigate every tweet he makes. Wolff describes the relationship trump has with his daughter, his son-in-law Jared, his sons Eric and Donald, and all of it is just so bizarre that if you try to fully understand it, you may end up on a shrink’s couch. How’d we get here as a country?

 Then there’s trump’s relationship with Bannon, who seemed to have talked freely with Wolff at various points during his tenure in the West Wing. Perhaps sleazy Bannon had his eye on a 2020 run for the presidency. That possibility seems pretty remote now. trump fired back with tweets, of course, about the book and how  when Bannon lost his job, he also lost his mind. And then there’s Sarah Sanders, trump’s liar in chief in the media, who says that the prez of course supports the first amendment, but that Fire and Fury is fiction, fantasy.

Sure, Sarah. And there’s a special place in hell for people like you. Just ask your Daddy Huckabee.

One thing you can bank on with trump and his people. If they deny something, then you know it’s true. They live in the upside world of Stranger Things. It’s where reality is not what the rest of us think it is, but is defined through some skewed lens where the most powerful person in the world lounges around in bed eating cheeseburgers from McDonald’s, watching Fox News, and playing twitter chicken with North Korean’s nuclear-armed nut case.

Wolff captures all of this brilliantly. My hope is that the book helps to bring down trump’s presidency.

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A multifaceted spirit contact story

Posted on January 4, 2018 by Trish and Rob

In August, our book on spirit contact will be published by Llewellyn. One of the best synchronicities connected to the book so far is that the copy editor, Rhiannon Nelson, mentioned that she has had a number of experiences of spirit contact. So I asked if she would share them. The following experience concerns her brother, Dale, who passed when he was just 24.

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My older brother Dale used to LOVE strawberry shampoo. His favorite was Suave and he would wash and condition with it all the time, leaving a light scent of strawberries on him. He also chewed Cherry Skoal chewing tobacco. Not sure if you’ve ever smelled it, but it was a very specific smell.

Tragically, my brother died when I was 22 years old and he was 24 years old. It was, needless to say, a horrible time in my life. A couple of years after he passed, I got a tattoo of his initials. It was a really bittersweet event for me, as I missed him terribly.

Driving home after getting the tattoo, I smelled strawberry shampoo and Cherry Skoal. I was so overcome with emotion, I had to pull over and compose myself. I knew he was with me, and he wanted me to feel him…and I did.

In August before his death, I had a dream that he died. It was horrible. And then when he died suddenly in November, I was overcome with guilt for not reading the signs. My sister helped me to realize that it was Spirit telling me he was going to leave me, and it was more of a preparation.

I once edited a book for Llewellyn, and one of the exercises in the book was to invite a spirit of a loved one to join you for something. So I spoke to Dale and asked if he would like to join me as I headed up to Duluth, MN, to visit with my younger brother and his family. I told him I would love for him to be with us for the day, and I would channel his love through me to my niece and nephew, who he never got to meet. As I drove north, a large bald eagle swooped down over my car and flew above me for a time, wings outstretched. It was Dale. He was obsessed with bald eagles, and drew them all the time when he was alive. I see them at the most opportune times, and I always know it’s him, checking in.

I have also had several mediums claim to talk to him, but only two rang true. In both instances, the medium said things they would never have known. And on one instance, Dale asked if his soul could come back into my life through someone else. I said yes, and when the group took a break, another woman attending the ceremony asked if she could ask me some follow-up questions. She too was a medium, and had felt his presence strongly, and wanted to know more.

She immediately started asking me about the people in my life to try to get a sense of where Dale’s soul might come through.

“Do you have a sister?” she asked. I said yes, one, as she seemed to read my aura after I said my answer. She said, “No, that’s not it.”

“Do you have a sister-in-law?” she asked. I said yes, two. Again she seemed to read my aura after I said my answer. She again said, “No, that’s not it.”

“Do you have close girlfriends?” she asked. “Yes, I have two girlfriends who are like sisters.” As she read me, she said, “Hmmmm, tell me about them.” I told her that one had two daughters and wasn’t planning on having any more children, and the other one had one biological daughter and an adopted son. She looked at me as if to say, Keep going. I told her that she and her husband had just miraculously conceived after 9+ years of trying. “Bingo, there’s your brother,” was her reply.

She told me to try to astral travel to my friend’s bedside for three nights in a row, and on the third night I would know if it was him. I don’t know how to astral travel, and although I tried, I didn’t feel successful, so I never felt the definitive click that she was correct. But I do know that she gave me her card after we chatted and asked me to keep her updated on what happened. The image on her card: a bald eagle.

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Stay tuned for Rhiannon’s next story – about the “haunted” house where she and her husband live.

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Weird or What?

Posted on January 2, 2018 by Trish and Rob

 

In 2012, Trish and I were invited to appear on William Shattner’s Weird or What to talk about the strange happenings in the life of physicist Wolfgang Pauli. Essentially, it seemed that psychokinetic events would happen whenever Pauli entered a lab. In other words, expensive equipment would crash, machinery would break down and odd things would happen to his companions…but never to Pauli.

The producer only wanted one of us on the air and we both simultaneously said, “You do it!” to each other. But my “You do it” had a bit more impact since Trish was better versed on Pauli than I was. So she sat in the hot seat under the lights.

We wrote about this experience here earlier because of the astonishing Pauli-related synchronicities that occurred in Toronto, especially related to the number 137, which was significant to Pauli. When we tried to post the video, we were blocked. But now it’s available so here it is (above).

There are three segments on the show, and Trish appears near the end of the third one that begins about minute 26:30. But the other two parts of that show are also very interesting. I just watched it again and had forgotten how fascinating they were. The first is about an alien abductee and the removal of his implant, and the second is the strange story of Pearl Curran, an uneducated woman who channeled novels about 18th century England, which she knew nothing about.  Enjoy!

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Los Tres Amigos

Posted on December 31, 2017 by Trish and Rob

Our beautiful and talented daughter, Megan, painted these 3 buddies and gave me the painting for Christmas. Left to right, they are: Nika, Noah, and Nigel. The three Ns!

They join us in wishing all of you the best for 2018!

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