Versatile Blogger Award, OMG, ROFLMAO

Due to a questionable, though potentially humorous ripple in the space-time continuum yesterday, author Smoky Zeidel awarded me the Versatile Blogger Award. According to the usual half-informed sources, this award forces me to divulge seven facts about myself that most of you don’t know without the benefits of a get out of jail free card or an invitation to join the FBI witness protection program.

1. I danced with a local mobster’s girl friend one night in Denver when he (the mobster) was out of town. The girl friend was also a stripper, though not while we were dancing to the celestial “Double Crossing Time” from the Blues Breakers with Eric Clapton album via the juke box.
2. I once delivered singing telegrams for Western Union even though I can’t sing. (I delivered regular telegrams, too.) Fortunately, strip telegrams were banned in Florida due to the size of the palmetto bugs.
3. My first byline came from Quill & Scroll Magazine when I was in high school. This occurred before I been introduced to the exciting world of mobsters’ girl friends and Eric Clapton.
4. My college roommate and I introduced a Vietnamese exchange student to President Lyndon B. Johnson as he shook hands with the mob (not the Mob) watching his plane come into Denver in 1966, the same year I danced with the stripper. We did not bring the stripper with us, but our friend from Saigon still got a nice smile from the leader of the free world.
5. After I got out of the Navy, my parents inadvertently asked during a Sunday afternoon dinner (moments after all of us got back from church) if “those stories” about Navy men going to bars in foreign ports frequented by strippers were true. When I said “yes,” they seemed pleasantly scandalized and said “that” was part of the price one paid for serving one’s country. I didn’t mention that I made a downpayment on that price several years earlier in Denver.
6. I had a school-boy crush on actresses Millie Perkins, Natalie Wood, and Nancy Kwan. I “fell in love” with Wood when I saw her in person on an old Chicago radio program called Don McNeill’s Breakfast Club. She was there promoting a new movie called “The Burning Hills.” She didn’t notice me because she was there with Tab Hunter. Wood wouldn’t sing “Let me do a few tricks, Some old and then some new tricks, I’m very versatile” for a few years yet.
7. En route to a Dutch shipbuilder where I did volunteer work one summer as part of an international youth group, we all swam in Amsterdam harbor after the captain of the barge we were using for transportation said the water was so dirty, nobody ever dared get in it. No strippers were present.

New Award Winners

According the the rules of the Versatile Blogger Award, I am supposed to pass along this award to 15 bloggers who currently have no idea I’m thinking of doing such a thing. Yet, they are writing blogs I enjoy reading:

1. Chelle Cordero, “Welcome to Chelle’s World”
2. Pamela Patchet, “A Novel Woman”
3. Neil Vogler, “A Writer, He Muttered”
4. Susanne Iles, “Bone Singer Studio”
5. Seth Mullins, “Spirituality With an Edge”
6. Shelly Bryant, “My Blog”
7. Lee Libro, “Literary Magic”
8. Floyd M. Orr, “POD Book Reviews & More”
9. Terry (aka Montucky), “Montana Outdoors”
10. Matt, “Just Wondering”

Well, I’m not as young as I was when I was dancing with strippers, swimming in Amsterdam harbor, talkin with President Johnson or singing “Happy Birthday” to the shocked residents of Tallahassee, Florida while wearing my Western Union badge. That means I’m out of steam and will stop at ten blogs on my list. Don’t bug me about this: I have Mob connections.

–Malcolm

Malcolm R. Campbell is the author of the comedy/satire, “Jock Stewart and the Missing Sea of Fire,” the novel credited with adding a little nooke to the Nook.

“The Secret” – Anything You Want

On page one of The Secret, Bob Proctor says, “The Secret gives you anything you want: happiness, health, and wealth.”

Can you imagine this?

Can you believe this? If you don’t, it won’t work. But if one is used to the way things have been, how does one believe in the secret enough to see real results?

I wonder if the “catch 22″ for most people trying to implement a way of thinking based on “The Secret” will be the question of belief rather than a lack of imagination. Should one start “small” or should one start with something of “no consequence” and figure nothing ventured nothing gained? And then “work up” to “larger” things?

When you first came across the law of abundance, either in “The Secret” or elsewhere, how did you handle the challenge of belief?

“The Secret” – First Impressions

Before seeing the book, I was skeptical about there being anything new here. There are three reasons for this:

1. Kabbalists, Rosicrucians, and others have been following spiritual paths for years. It seemed unlikely that all of the students and teachers on these paths were unaware of the secret. In fact, Kabbalist Michael Berg just published another book called The Secret five years ago with the subtitle: “The most powerful teaching of the world’s oldest spiritual wisdom.”
2. Many of the people–mentioned in press reports–who purportedly knew the secret in the past didn’t strike me as the kind of folks who would hide their knowledge of it. In fact, the reverse seemed more likely. For every powerful individual who might keep such knowledge to himself, there are countless others who love telling secrets and sharing their knowledge. How then, could the secret be secret?
3. Hearing the words “law of attraction” coming out of the PR buzz about the book and the film, I remembered a rather pricey set of audio tapes I bought some years ago by a very well known spiritual, positive energy teacher.  Many of the tapes were very inspiring as they discussed the unlimited abundance available and how to attract it into our lives. Then, when I got to the last tape, the teacher said, more or less, “if the universe doesn’t think you’re ready for what you desire, you’re not going to get it so you’ll need to learn to go with the flow.” What a giant escape clause!

Okay, looking at the actual hardback book here, several things come to mind:

1. It’s attractive.
2. The layout and sequence of the book, while also attractive, bother me because I’d rather see more words, less white space, and less back-and-forth discussion. (I’ll stipulate, that is is a bias and I’ll try not to let it influence me as I read.)
3. In the foreword, the author says that her daughter showed her a hundred year old book and that’s how the search for the secret began. The journalist in me just wonders why the title of that book couldn’t have been mentioned. It’s a small thing, but the implication here is that the reader is “not ready” to know the name of that book. I’m tempted to think the book is James Allen’s As a Man Thinketh. Perhaps I’ll learn that later.
4. I like the author’s discussion (also in the foreword) about becoming a magnet for people, ideas and sources as she searched for information. This synchronicity has been experienced by a lot of people, but it certainly is a great illustration of the law of attraction (as I understand it prior to reading the book) and how it works when somebody is passionately determined to learn something or do something.

How did you feel when you first picked up the book? Expectant? Skeptical, but in hopes of being proven wrong? Inspired, ready to read to the last page in one sitting?

Superstition

“A physicist had a horsehoe hanging on the door of his laboratory. His colleagues were surprised and asked whether he believed it would bring luck to his experiments. He answered, “No, I don’t believe in superstitions. But I have been told that it works evenif you don’t believe in it.” –R. L. Weber

The other night some character on a TV show said that it was better to believe than not to believe. If one believes in God and there is no God, then no harm, no foul; but if there is a God, then one has it covered.

The sun is out today, so I’m not quite sure why I’m wondering this afternoon how many people are going through the motions. Some are putting up horseshoes and throwing salt over their shoulders. Some go to Church. Some meditate or go on journeys or astral travel. Are they going because they are hedging their bets or because they truly believe there is something more to the world and to ourselves than meets the physical eye?

I wonder. Yet, I choose to believe most who say they believe actually do believe. I like the half full glass of water better than the half empty glass.