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June 29, 2006
Men's Club: Talking and Driving
"What don't men talk when they drive?"
That's today's topic. But really, who says?
The fact is, men don't often talk as much as women anyway. As I pointed out in some previous post (I don't have time to track it down) men don't talk about their inner selves, their thoughts, their relationships. That talk about external things. Sports, politics, why women talk so much.
Let's face it: When men drive with women, we're afraid. We're afraid of talking about our feelings. We're afraid of talking about the relationship.
So it's not really true that men don't talk when they drive. They just don't talk about women stuff.
And women often don't want to talk about men stuff: computers, business reports, what's happening in Iraq.
There. Capisce?
Check out dem talking women: The Devastating Divas: silk, Phoenix, Theresa, and Arielle. And James, the other member of the Men's Club.
Posted by witnit at 11:45 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
Longs Days, Late Nights
ere in Taiwan, our team of five intrepid interviewers and trainers typically wake up between 4 and 5 am, start working by 7 am, and stay up working or being entertained by the locals until 12 or 1 am.
Not much room left for blogging. I do stand-up training today. Don't know what will happen tonight. We fly out tomorrow morning, Saturday, from Taipei at 9:30 am, and then arrive in San Francisco (via Nagoya, Japan) about 30 minutes before we left at 9:00 am Saturday.
Then it's stay up all day in hopes of sleeping normally Saturday night.
Yippee!
Posted by witnit at 2:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 26, 2006
R.I.P. Rob
t looks like our favorite rough-and-tumble curmudgeon has passed away. Rob aka "Acidman" at Gut Rumbles.
I think it fair to say that one of the great honest voices has left the blogosphere. And we are the poorer for it
Rob, you will be missed.
I really love the letter Eric wrote to Rob.
Posted by witnit at 10:24 PM | Comments (1)
Taiwan Heat
t's hot, it's muggy, but we made it okay and I've got two days of interviewing, and two days of training or facilitating problem solving.
What a life. The food's okay so far. I'm sure they will take us out sometime to experiment on us.
Posted by witnit at 9:53 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 25, 2006
Travel Update
ust got back from Shanghai and now I'm off to Taiwan. It's been a little busy to try to keep up with this poor blog. Back soon.
Posted by witnit at 8:24 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 20, 2006
Pah-Dee?
had my first experience in Asia of being propositioned by a "lady of the evening" and I didn't even realize it at first.
I was walking near my hotel on Saturday night and I saw a female approach me with a big smile. I assumed she was going to ask for money. What else could it be? She looked about 12 years old.
She came up to me smiling and said, "Pah-dee?" I didn't understand her and smiled back and shrugged and shook my head not understanding. She then said, very clearly, "Sex?"
Oh. The light dawned. "Party" as in "Do you want to Party?"
So she probably wasn't 12 years old; she was probably older than that, but who knew? Frankly, I've never indulged in that activity. I haven't even been inside a strip joint. I smiled and said no.
When I told this story to a female colleague, she said, "Oh yeah, the area around this hotel is famous for that. The bartender on the first floor of the hotel will get you hooked up with a girl no problem." Apparently, other male colleagues when they travel to Asia indulge.
For me, some things should just stay at the level of fantasy.
Posted by witnit at 9:49 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
June 18, 2006
Men's Club: You Can Leave Your Hat On
'm behind the times on the Men's Club circuit due to travel. Especially with a topic like "What's the sexiest thing a member of the opposite sex can put on and what's the sexiest thing they can take off?"
Requires some thought. And here's what I think:
Putting ON: Women in tasteful lingerie works for me. Not the gaudy Frederic's of Hollywood or Victoria's Secret stuff. Just nice, white, pink, or black lacy and somewhat see-through panties and bra can do wonders with that all-important sense of ANTICIPATION.
And frankly, I love working my fingers and toungue around the lace.
Taking Off: Everything but the lingerie.
Heh heh. Easy now that I think about it.
Check out the rest of the gang: The Devastating Divas: silk, Phoenix, Theresa, and Arielle. And James, the other member of the Men's Club.
Posted by witnit at 8:54 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 17, 2006
Shanghai, Again
ust arrived at the hotel after a 13-hour flight. The weather is mild and hazy. Something must be going on because some of the main boulevards of tree-lined streets are decorated with pretty lights. I'm staying at the Intercontinental hotel. First time here. Very nice. On the 22nd floor with a great view of Pudong. And the service is spectacular...if you like their calling and ringing you up every 10 minutes to see how it's going. Tomorrow i have a mini-blog meet with Ian H. of Banana Oil! We meet at the Shanghai City of Books. He's promised to do a walking tour as long as I pay for lunch. Fair enough.
Posted by witnit at 6:43 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 14, 2006
Let's Make Nice
nce again, Jonah Goldberg gets it right. Too many of us are deluded in thinking that jihadists have no desire to kill "nice" people or "nice" governments. In fact, that niceness is part of the attraction:
The presence of a profoundly evil, homegrown terror cell in Canada has understandably provoked a lot of soul-searching to our north. As one Canadian editorial put it: “We are Canada, peacekeepers to the world, everybody’s nice guy. Who would want to harm us, and why?” Or as Audrey Macklin, a University of Toronto law professor, confessed to the Los Angels Times, Canadians “picture themselves as being thought of as nicer than the United States.” Why on earth would terrorists want to hurt a “nice” country? Well, for starters, nice isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. The frog who carried the scorpion on his back in Aesop’s fable was nice. It didn’t make the scorpion’s sting any less poisonous.Indeed, there’s good reason to believe that niceness is part of the problem, not the solution. Many Canadians (and Americans and Europeans) cling to a deep-seated belief that more multiculturalism, more interfaith dialogue, more “understanding,” more Western apologies, more acceptance of Sharia, more “niceness” will fix the problem.
As the American Enterprise Institute’s Reuel Marc Gerecht and the French intellectual Olivier Roy have suggested, multiculturalism in many ways breeds Islamic radicalism among deracinated “born-again” Muslims in the West. It foments the climate of grievance and honors the quest for radical authenticity. Indeed, jihadism imports any number of Marxist and anti-colonial bugaboos into its worldview and then spits them back out at the West. “This militant evolution is happening, in situ, on our territory. It partakes henceforth of the internal history of the West,” Roy observed. The 9/11 hijackers were Westernized, educated, and cosmopolitan. Nearly all of the alleged Canadian plotters were raised in Canada and attended Canadian public schools. They were indeed homegrown.
Posted by witnit at 6:41 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 13, 2006
Reading List
read a mention of the great Robert Crais over at Pun Salad. If you've never read Robert Crais, especially his Elvis Cole P.I. series, you're in for a treat. Cole is an L.A. Private Eye, with an apparently brutish friend named Pike, who likes Mickey Mouse and getting into trouble. Crais is a top-notch writer, and if you want a line on where to start, go to his page at booksnbytes.com and start with The Monkey's Raincoat.
This past week I started a couple new authors (for me). Stuart Woods and W.E.B. Griffin. I've known about both for a while, but because of my tendency to start from the beginning of an author and work my way through, I had some to finish up, like Lee Childs, another great writer with his Jack Reacher series.
I've already read the first two Stone Barrington novels by Woods. I have the rest in a stack. I'm now in the middle of the first The Corps novel, Semper Fi, and enjoying the hell out of it. It starts in Shanghai, 1941, where I'll be in a few days, in space if not in time. I'm going to take several more Griffin and Woods books with me on these next two trips.
If you like mystey/military/PI/justice kind of books, these are all good reading. I should also throw in Robert B. Parker's Jesse Stone books, which I just ran through a few weeks ago. The writing and character is very similar to Spenser, but still good reading.
Posted by witnit at 2:32 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
1. Creating Your Life
he information that follows is partially influenced by material offered by The Pacific Institute in Seattle, Washington, and partially by other sources. If you like the stuff on How The Mind Works, please consider attending the Investment in Excellence training.
1. Creating Your Life - The Land of the Blind
First, before going any further, I want you to watch a short video. It requires Java active in your browser and its about 7 MB, so it will take some time to download. The video shows some students passing a basketball. Some students are dressed in white and the others are dressed in black. Here is the test. Watch the video one time and count the number of times the students in WHITE pass the ball. Simple enough, right? Okay. Watch the Basketball Video.
If you have trouble with the video, then try this test. Read the following sentence once, then follow the instructions EXACTLY that follow:
FINISHED FILES ARE THE RESULT
OF YEARS OF SCIENTIFIC STUDY
COMBINED WITH THE EXPERIENCE
OF MANY YEARS OF EXPERTS.
Now go back and read the sentence ONE time and count the letters "F."
Finished? Okay. First the video.
How many times was the basketball passed among the players in white? 16? 17?
Okay. Here's the question: Did you see the Gorilla? That's right, the Gorilla. Go back and watch the video again.
Meanwhile, how many "Fs" did you count? 2? 3? 4?
Did you count 5? 6? 7?
That's right. There are 7 "Fs." Go back and find them.
Still not seeing them? Isn't it strange, especially for those of you who count only 3 "Fs," that you can be told that there are 7 "Fs' in the sentence and yet you STILL can't see them.
If you don't believe me, then go back and count the "OFs" in the sentence. That's right. There are four of them, aside from the 3 others in the bigger words.
Here's one more test for you. Check out this picture of a woman.
Now, how would you describe her? Is she a young woman or old woman? Is she wearing a choker around her neck, or is she a hag with a big nose?
Of couse, the image holds both and old woman AND a young woman, depending on how you look at it. Go back and see if you can see the other woman. If you locked on to one image, you will likely find it terribly difficult to see the other woman. Here's a clue: The young woman is looking away from you and wearing a black choker around her neck. The old hag is in profile and her big nose is the young girl's chin. If you find it impossible to see it yourself, you can find the answers here.
Okay. So what? A few optical illusions, right? No big deal.
Well, my friend, it IS a big deal, especially if you are concerned about seeing TRUTH in the world and inside of yourself. It IS a big deal if you go around unaware that you have blindspots to the truth.
The Basketball/Gorilla video demonstrates that when you FOCUS on something, you become BLIND to everything else. This is good up to a point. Great high-performing people, in sports or business or anywhere else, demonstrate an ability to focus that blocks out distractions, that creates blindspots to everything irrelevant to what they are focusing on.
But there is a down side as well. When you lock on to what you believe the truth to be (or believe to be the "purpose," like the purpose I gave you in counting the number of passes between players in white) that missile lock can blind you to other important things that are going on as well.
This is how magicians work. AND it is how advertisers, media manipulators, politicians, and predatory people (forgers, con artists, men on dates) generally work. They get you to lock on to one thing so you are blind to something else.
The fact is, if you want to change, to grow, to get to the TRUTH, whatever it may be, you may want to consider a few things:
1) How are blindspots created?
2) Do I have blindspots that limit or control me?
3) How can I discover my blindspots?
4) How can I avoid creating blindspots that limit or control me?
5) How can I recognize blindspots in other people?
6) How can I recognize when others are intentionally or unintentionally trying to create blindspots in me?
7) How can I get past blindspots and into creating my life in a free-flowing manner with abundant energy? Because a lot of your blindspots are keeping you from having spontaneous and continuing energy to accomplish your goals.
This is the starting point for this series of posts. I want to point out to you some things about yourself, about your mind, and about your creative potential. The fact is, you are probably living only a small part of your potential. And that there are blindposts in you holding you back, blindposts in the form of PICTURES that you are holding about yourself, about others, and about REALITY that keep you from doing what you could do if you only knew that you had it within you to do it.
Until I'm able to move forward with this new series, you may want to move to How The Mind Works.
Posted by witnit at 9:59 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack
June 12, 2006
Back from Seattle; Next Stop, Shanghai
y wife and I just got back from Seattle where we spent three days in a Pacific Institute seminar with Lou Tice.
I believe this is the best training of it's kind. What do they do? They give you specific tools to transform yourself. Tools that acutally work when you apply them. And I have.
My wife's business is undergoing some changes, so I thought it a good idea to spend the $2000 per couple (plus airfare and hotel) to listen to Lou and go through the program (with 8 weeks of assimilation CDs provided for after the weekend). I used to facilitate this material back in the early '90s at a Business College. It is quite simply the most powerful material in the genre of personal and professional excellence I've ever seen, and I've seen quite a bit.
FYI, Lou is not a motivational speaker. He is a coach.
Some of the material I've convered in my posts on How The Mind Works and Creating Your Life.
But I think after going through the material this weekend that I will update that series of posts over the next few months, starting from scratch and using more detail and examples. (Besides, almost all those links are on the old website anyway...)
Also, this Friday I fly again to Shanghai for a week, where I hope to have lunch with blogger Ian of Banana Oil. After that, I fly back to the US and then 3 days later fly out again to Taiwan for a week.
Sounds like fun, eh?
Anyway, stay tuned for more in the genre of personal and professional excellence. If you like what you hear and you are looking for a way to increase the productivity, joy, and fun of your life by at least 1000%, check out Lou Tice.
Posted by witnit at 8:52 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 8, 2006
Men's Club: A Kiss Before Dying
he topic du jour: Kisses mean lots of different things to different people, what do they mean to you?
Yeah, there are lip kisses and forehead kisses and neck kisses and cheek kisses...I think silk pretty much says what I think about these.
No matter how you look at it, a kiss implies some kind of intimacy. Frankly, one of my favorites is the "Inner Thigh" kiss.
I like those tender areas of the inner thigh, and I think the right kind of kisses applied in the right kinds of ways can sent your sweethart to the moon! It is a kiss that more men should pay extra special attention to, becuase it is the kind of kiss that generates a special...anticipation. Properly applied anticipation can do more for someone than we appreciate sometimes.
Be sure to check out the Devastating Divas, good receivers of kissers all, I'd bet: silk, Phoenix, Theresa, and Arielle. And don't forget James, the other member of the Men's Club.
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Posted by witnit at 10:12 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
June 7, 2006
Mucous Factory
've been sick. It started as sinus pain. That REALLY sucks. And it wasn't just a regular sinus/headcold/runny nose thing. The mucous was really thick and dark. Not yellow, but brown, with chunky goodness.
Then it moved into my chest and I began excreting, collecting and coughing up bucketfulls of dark brown thick mucous.
That was last week. I'm better now. Just took me a while to write it up.
Posted by witnit at 8:32 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
June 5, 2006
Hello, Florence, Italy
did it! I booked a flight to Florence, Italy, for a 10-day stay over Christmas. For the first 5 nights we stay in a B&B with a this view. Right there in the heart of the Duomo district!
The next four days are in ANOTHER B&B somewhat farther away. We have the Golden Suite, which includes a double jacuzzi. (The first B%B has a small bathroom with only a shower.) From our Golden Suite we will take day trips throughout Tuscany, including Siena and Pisa. You can see pics of our room here and here and here.
The cost is high, so I guess I'm giving up on a retirement fund. Might as well spend it while I can and simply work until I croak. (I had to pay an extra $1000 per economy ticket to United Airlines just to have the right to use my miles to upgrade to Business Class, but the wife thinks it's worth it. She who must be obeyed.)
Also, I plan to fulfill a special request by Our Maximum Leader. Stay tuned.
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Posted by witnit at 2:40 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
June 2, 2006
Pulp Fiction Hockey
ules was a youth hocky coach. Who woulda figured?
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Posted by witnit at 1:39 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Chilling Video
ere's a chilling video of Americans watching jihadists and then taking them out. Technology. Whew!
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Posted by witnit at 1:21 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
June 1, 2006
Men's Club: Are we having a relationship, or just doing research on each other?
oday's topic: 'How do you pre-identify a cheater, or one who has the potential to cheat?'
Since I'm married I'm not much into such pre-identification. But I think it's pretty safe to list some categories of potential cheaters:
1) Horny males
2) Horny females
3) Good person who's not getting any at home
4) High-powered business person
5) Actor or actress, theater or film
6) Politician
7) Traveling salesman
8) Anyone who admits having tried out a brothel and enjoyed it
I think that covers quite a swath of people.
Be sure to check out the Devastating Divas, none of whom would dare cheat: silk, Phoenix, Theresa, and Arielle. And don't forget James, the other member of the Men's Club.
Posted by witnit at 2:03 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
