I have had to neglect the blog due to work, baby and editing of two books which I hope to bring to you soonish. Despite the hiatus however, know that my writing is continuing, just not here for the moment, but I will return.

In the meantime, you can just watch that little picture above for a while, knowing that you will be compelled to return here regularly for the rest of your natural life.

The process of starting a very demanding job again in the cubicle forest, as well as going through the process of becoming a dad for the first time and not forgetting the 41 videos we now have FINISHED and are ALL UP (see www.wayofsystema.com) for the Systema Book all took a toll. (What?!? you haven’t bought one yet? Hurry, Amazon put them on special giving $20 off for Xmas. Dunno how long they will do this for though as I have no control on their pricing and marketing strategies. So if you want one go HERE.)

Something had to give and after doing 13 hour days at work, trying to keep up training and working every week-end for the last 4 months to get the videos out despite many, many issues, the blog suffered.

But it’s all done now, and we have done some 41 videos instead of the original 30 promised, so we hope the long wait was worth it.

In other news, my little daughter is great and we could not be happier with her, she laughs already and she really is the most amazing Christmas present we could have wished for.

May you all have a loving Christmas and a very very happy New Year, and may 2012 truly be the end of all the bad worlds any of us may have carried with us for years. Redhead Girl, our Little Princess and I all wish you the very best.

Love to all,

G.

Christmas 2011

Welcome my little girl. Born today 11.11.11 and despite the worst efforts of several morons, healthy, smart and already grabbing my finger and only suffering face bruising from the foreceps. Redhead girl is the bravest person I know and basically whatever flaws the females of the human species may have in regards to logic or anything else, they definitely are the better of the two. Nothing a man might ever do can even begin to compare. Going to sleep for a bit before I return to my girls.

Hilarious and Oh so true too. Click the link below for one of the coolest videos ever.

FeloniousMunk

Only to realise the stirred up sushi-latte now requires urgent expulsion. You rush two floors down. No other toilets. Cramping you go back up then climb one floor. Nothing. And another. Still nothing and you have no more floors to explore! There must be another toilet. Armed with the courage that can only come from an imminent ass explosion, you make your way past the front office of a firm of solicitors as if you owned the firm.

You walk down a long corridor at random and then turn and… Then you see it. Divine Intervention. God loves you.

This is my first post done from my mobile. Given the limits on my time, I think if it works it will become a favourite way to do quick updstes. And for your viewing pleasure here is a random picture for you. Redheadgirl and little pexionauta.

The Salty Droid

Scourge of Internet Frudsters

My route to becoming a qualified hypnotist (insofar as anyone can lay claim to that dubious title: Qualified – Keep in mind any certificate to this effect is issued by an organisation that has absolutely no checks and balances on it whatsoever. Sort of like banks really. Or government. And you trust your government don’t you?) was a strange one and I was extremely lucky in that I learnt the basics from a guy who is without a doubt excellent at teaching how to do hypnosis. Beyond that, it was my own obsessive nature that prevailed in making this skill really useful and more importantly, NOT DANGEROUS for my clients and other guinea pigs, victims, good friends. A hypnotist that actually has the ability to hypnotise and does so indiscriminately can cause serious damage to people. This is not discussed much in the hypnosis world, because well…you don’t want to scare off prospective meal tickets do you? Fortunately, as with my martial arts, I never required to make my living from hypnosis.

I do it because I enjoy it and because it is a truly useful skill to have in order to help people who really want to change some aspect of their life they may be struggling with.

The path to learning hypnosis however is a rather difficult one. Danger in the form of snake-oil salesmen lies at truly every turn. If you do manage somehow (more by luck perhaps than any particular skill) to come through unscathed and learn the skill well, it does open up a fascinating world to you. Religion and sects lose much of their distinctions one from the other and you begin to see them as two sides of the same coin. Fraudsters and confidence men become more obvious and plentiful in everyday life as they become far more visible. And so do the number of deluded people leading others into further delusion.

The blind leading the blind if you will. As time passes you begin to truly despise the circumstances that get the original idiots to buy into the scams and then go on to perpetuate them themselves. After a while you even stop caring if people who scam are aware that they are scammers or not. Because sad as it is, some of the scammers are so fully invested in bullshitting themselves as well as you, their potential client that they are, like many peadophiles, both victims and abusers. Of course, just as with the pedos, in my mind, it’s generally been fine to hang them all and let “god” sort them out.

There is a distinction though, between the consciously evil scammers and the merely deeply brainwashed ones. There is also, I have concluded, a very real piece of information that is the only sure-fire proof against the scammers in the main. It’s a powerful belief in self. A conscious understanding and trust as well as a very deeply ingrained unconscious belief in yourself as the best arbitrer of what is ultimately best for you. It is rare. It requires a fundamentally powerful loving presence in childhood from your parents that is stronger than anything life throws at them or you. I was lucky. I had this. Even then, bad things can still happen. You could be violated at a young age and the damage this does is so deep it also damages that deeply engrained self-esteem. Again, I was perhaps lucky in this regard. I never suffered such attentions from the unfortunately high number of perverts that roam the planet. Partly, I think, because the first effect was so strongly embedded in me that I have no doubt even as a small child, if I had fallen prey to a molester, I would have had to be killed to be kept silent.

These may seem like disjointed points, but bear with me reader. Internet marketers and generally bulshitters who try to sell you pipe dreams are a corrosive presence on the planet we share that are in their own way just as bad as battery acid. Slowly but surely they corrode the human parts of us if you allow them to filter in.

I have written before about the desperate snake-oil salesman that inhabit the PUA culture, and the self-help culture and also the internet marketing culture. And in each of these cases I use the word culture, more in its biologist’s sense, that is a putrefying bio-mass of bacteria feeding on the corpses of dying cells and producing so much excrement that later gets consumed by others.

I have, in general, been rather a lot more kind to many self-help gurus and PUAs and so on. In part this is because human nature is fallible and I try to give people the benefit of the doubt, but that is not to say I would so much as have a cup of coffee with any of them. I have met a few of the people I write about and while I have no qualms calling a fraudster a fraudster, I do not honestly have the time to dig all that deep into any of their miserable little lives. Luckily though, someone does. Salty Droid. I strongly suggest before you buy anything related to selling things online, you go and visit salty droid’s site. His style is brutal and harsh, but if you read a few of his articles you will get the jist of it and return to read more. Eventually you will even laugh out loud for real at some of his sentences. He definitely tears the scammers a new one. And I only wish we could clone him and build a much wider net of honest citizens that ferret out the weasels. But it’s not as easy as you think. Here’s a test that should wake you up a little.

Try googling for anything bad on Tony Robbins. It’s not as easy as you think.

That’s right. Self-made billionaire (or is it only multi-millionaire?) Tony “big-assed teeth” Robbins. You think at least a couple of articles about him on the websphere might be critical right? I know first hand I had some not-good experiences with his organisation, and personally know others who had similarly negative experiences. I went to some of his events, which are by no means free, and in one a young kid, who I happened to know through his dad who I had also met at a similar earlier event won a Harley Davidson motorcycle in a raffle. Do you think that kid ever actually go that bike? Dream on. I corresponded with his dad for years on it and he never did get it. This is just a tiny incident, but really, aside from a forum that deals with LGAT (Large Group Awareness Training – or if you prefer, brainwashing 101 for large crowds) there is precious little on the net telling you anything bad about Tony. Because he’s such a nice guy surely. Right? Yeah…sure…believe it. Also: The government loves you, the cheque is in the post and I’m only going to rest it there a little without pushing.

As it happens anyone writing anything meaningfully real about Tony that does not meet with his PR machine’s approval gets a cease and desist letter and a threat of a lawsuit it seems. You know; allegedly.

Go visit Salty Droid. It’s entertaining and educational. And as such it is a sad reflection of the state of our 1984 reality  that it has to be hosted on a special server that aggressively defends the right to free speech. Go figure.

Frank Frazetta passed away almost a year ago. Luckily, his work will live on for a long time. Forever I hope. I have always been a fan of his work and read the novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs mostly on the strength of the art that so often coloured the covers of his books. Frazetta did many book covers over the years and his art has always had a dynamism to it that made me wish I was born in a pulp novel with spaceships, ray gun and scantily clad females. Sadly only one of those three things is normally available on this planet, but I suppose it is the better one of the three. I am working on the zap gun though. And the spaceship is sure to follow.

I have always had a secret wish to be able to draw well. In truth I am not completely inept at this, but I am nowhere near what I think is passable. Mostly because I gave up at a young age when I thought I was not gifted for it, which in fact was not really the case. I just didn’t realise the amount of practice one required. Later I never had the time, but I still hope maybe in old age, if I ever make enough to retire, I will be able to pick it up.

One of the questions I ask people sometimes is if they had the possibility to pick three skills they would like what they would be.

One of mine would be to be able to draw and paint like Frazetta. What would yours be?

Here is something cool for you though:

Tales of the Gold Monkey (Link to amazon UK)

Tales of the Gold Monkey (Link to Amazon USA)

The tales of the Gold Monkey was a show which I saw only a couple of episodes of when I was a kid  in the early eighties, but I was sorry the series (or more likely the reception, as we lived in Botswana then) went off air shortly after it started. I always remembered it though and looked for it online from time to time. FINALLY some genius has put it on DVD, the whole series too!

Now, I did read some of the reviews on amazon before buying it and I was worried that like so many other things from my misspent youth this would have aged badly and I would not enjoy it at all.

I am glad to report this was not at all the case. The show is indeed quite “over the top” but in the same way that Indiana Jones is. In other words, in a way I quite love. And it is a PERFECT show. The violence is somewhat theatrical, yet present, the acting is quite B-class but just kitch enough to make it brilliant and with some genuine moments of inspired B-Acting, and the plots…oh the plots…they basically make this the best damn birthday present I have bought myself in along time. The Gold Monkey has it all. Nazi nuclear bombs, lost Egyptian tribes, anachronistic elements that don’t really fit together and B-movie acting. It’s perfect. Truly a work of wonder. It has 22 episodes in the DVD pack but I am miserly with them as I fear running out of them. If you ever saw the original show you will not be disappointed if you get this. And if you never saw it before get it. Trust me…B-style films never get this good again. This is like pulp film. Brilliant. It’s right up there as one of my all time favourite film things, and probably at number one for TV series, right up there with NCIS and Dexter though these are two very different shows.

So yeah, while I avoid telling you about my life (not much new there) and work (lots new there but it’s for a wealthy and semi-famous client and he likes his privacy so he shall have it from me), be grateful I share this gem of cinematic genius with you. More than 24 hours of excellent entertainment. Not many blogs point to that today. It’s pretty cheap too at about 25 bucks. So if you are stuck for something good to see on TV, now you know what to get.

One last little bit of info…this series came out in 1982 but in it (although in classic B-cinema style) there is a semi-accurate representation of the fact that the Nazis had more advanced atomic bomb technology than the Americans. Something that is still not widely recognised today and only became public in 1992 with the release of certain documents under the FOI act. How Don Bellisario knew of it (or guessed it) before then is not known, but it just goes to show. All good B-movies really tell the deepest truths. At least about Nazis. You know it.