Bear’s Book Blog

I will be on the deck on in the driveway grilling out. Seems to me that this is the safest day of all. Why? Because the scriptures say that no man knows when the end is come, except the Father.

Still, it is a chuckalicious concept for me and more than a few small government proponents like myself. I am so stinking tired of Washington assholes stealing my money and then using it to buy votes with that I am sometimes beside myself. I mean, look at what Obama said to Joe the Plumber.

WHO THE HELL IS OBAMA TO TAKE MONEY FROM JOE AND GIVE IT TO SOMEONE ELSE?

Whatever. I am over it. I am looking at November 2010 for now. 2012 will have to wait.

…and yet, here I sit feeling a delicious involuntary thrill at the idea of not having to pay half my freakin’ paycheck to the government and running around scavenging for what is left of civilization. Most men with measurable levels of testosterone wonder from time to time what it would be like to be in the wilderness, building a butt and pass log cabin with his own hands, said hands growing in strength with every downed tree, and every notch cut… and no one @#$%ing with you every time you make a dollar. Why do we feel this way in the face of such a possible tragedy? Because, natcherly, we will be one of the survivors. What the world changers and the Progressives refuse to understand is that some of us would indeed rather be dead than Red, or enslaved to the likes of Obama, Reid, and Pelosi.

You and I both know the only way that will happen is if one of us is no longer around. Since I really don’t like paying taxes, I do because there is this thing called the IRS with a gun to my head, telling me I have to ‘voluntarily’ file, I vote for a world changing event. Yes, I would rather be free to do as I please rather than sure of three meals, especially because I am not assured of three meals with the draconian taxes we have to pay.

Check out this video set. Do I believe the world will end on December 21st, 2012? Nope. Not even a little bit, but the video is a lot more informative about ancient cultures and mathematical systems, or metamagical if you want to use a different term, than that silly movie with Cusack. Check it out and get your copy here.

Well, we are. After fighting with Joomla! (all due respect to the Joomla! folks, I know it is powerful because I have seen some killer sites based on it) I finally decided enough was enough and that a blog is what I want right now, not a content management system (CMS) and yes, I know WordPress is more than just a blog platform so give it a rest.

After careful consideration I decided that it m0re likely I would master WordPress to the extent that I could make it do what I wished with my book review blog than that I would master php, css, and mysql to the point I could get Earthtiger, Bear’s Book Blog’s home domain off the ground. It may have been that I was editing My Heart, My Fate as well as working a fulltime job and trying to square away a few more issues relating to another trip to the Philippines. After getting up at 3 or 4AM and editing until I had to go to work and start my shift at 7AM, getting home around 5PM, fighting with how I was going to build a supply chain from the Philippines that was profitable, and then looking at pages explaining CSS? Forget it. Sorry, not for me. You can only be good at so many things so plucka plucka plucka call me chicken.

Why the sudden dawning of the light? The take charge attitude? Going to forge ahead and bygod make this Blog Thing work? Well, I have to credit this fellow who says he can show me how to get 150,000 people to read my blog. Hey, even if I only get 15,000 folks to read my blog or even 1500 I will be happy. Yes, it is sad, this craving for attention but I read constantly and I think I know a good book when I see one. I even think I know enough about what makes a good story that I sat down and wrote one. I didn’t like it that the story ended, so I wrote another one. Now, I am working on a third and hey, I got an agent, so yay for me. I do SO hope it works out. Even if it doesn’t I wrote the thing so I AM a writer is how I am looking at it.

But back to this fellow, Ramit Sethi. He wrote a blog entry called How to get 150,000 people to read your blog post in 1 week (and how I did it) and in that blog…well, will you look at that, I had every intention of crediting his entry and when I copied the title of the page WordPress 2.7 was kind enough to insert it as a link….cool beans!

In that blog entry he had a conversation with his readers about not getting so caught up on the platform. Well, I took it to heart and here I am back on WordPress. I will probably leave my Joomla! site up for a while. I don’t know how to convert it to WordPress anyways and even were it possible, I don’t know that I would. The site was not doing what I wanted and I feel like it lost focus. I, ME, lost my focus in what I am trying to accomplish.

Current reading list is Atlas Shrugged  by Ayn Rand and Facebook Marketing by Steven Holzner.

-Tim

The following is written by Mary Jane of Butuan:

I am Proud I am a Filipino

August 5, 2008 2:05PM

I am proud of my heritage…

I came from brown-skinned ancestors who crossed the seas to settle in this part of the world. For more than four centuries I have been under foreign rule but I have become richer from my contact with them. Peoples from all parts of the globe have to settle here and intermarry with my ancestors. They, too, have contributed to my being as a result. I have developed a culture, a way of life, that is rich and colorful because of the varied influences of different cultures. My culture shows Chinese, Spanish, and American influences and a smattering of Dutch, Indonesian, Malayan and Japanese ways.

Although it cannot be said I am of pure breed, I am proud to say that I have earned the right to the name Filipino. For the way of life I have developed is my own and is now known throughout the world. My brown skinned brothers and I have proven to the world that our country and our people have many things to offer.

I am proud of my land that God endowed with natural resources. The bountiful seas give my people a wide variety of edible fish, shrimps, crabs, and shells. Rich copper and mine deposits are found in the heart of our mountains.

My people do not suffer extremes of temperatures. Nobody dies of sunstroke or extreme heat nor of frostbite or extreme cold. Rains especially during July and August water the fields to help yield a big harvest. Nobody really dies of hunger in my country. Although many of my brothers are poor, they still manage to eat decent meals.

God has also blessed my country with beautiful spots and breathtaking views. The majestic mountain ranges that run through a good portion of the country, the numerous islands that dot the emerald seas, the clouds that race across the clear, blue sky, the blaze of color that signals the start and end of the day – all these have rightfully earned for my country the name I am proud of my people…

It cannot be denied that tourists from the different parts of the world have been impressed with the beautiful scenic spots in the different parts of the my country but they have been more lavish in their praises of the royal treatment they get in my country. They go back to their homes with wonderful stories and about my people’s hospitality and with glowing descriptions of my beautiful countrymen – especially the young women who are rare combinations of grace, beauty, and brains. They go back home with souvenirs  made by my people of delicately embroidered dresses and handerkerchiefs, native bags, decorative items made from shells and bamboo, brassware and many, many more.

With all these blessings am I not right in saying I am Filipina?

Filipino Folklore

August 4, 2008 10:30AM

• The bride to be shoudn’t be try to wear her wedding dress before the day of the wedding or the wedding will not take place.
• Cutting a baby’s eyelashes during the first month will make them grow long and beautiful
• Give a generous discount on the first day of opening business to the first day of opening business to the first customer so that your sales for the day will increase.
• If a spoon falls during a meal, you’ll be visited by a woman; if a fork it’s man
• Going to bed with wet hair leads to blindness
• When three people pose for a photo, the one in the middle will be the first to die.
• Breaking mirror will bring 7 years of bad luck
• Whistling will cause the wind to blow
• If you happen to get lost, wear back your clothes and you’ll find way
• If the one catches the bride bouquet after wedding ceremony, she will also get married soon.
• A person with big ears will have a long life.
• A baby with a big birthmark on its body will be lucky.
• If a baby cries during his baptismal ceremony, it will have a long life.
• Wishing in the first star that one seas in the evening will make that wish come true.
• One should not pay or give money through the window because it will make him poor.
• Debts should be paid at night or it brings bad luck.
• If a white butterfly enters the house it means a friendly spirit or love or relative is visiting you.
• If a brown butterfly enters the house it means there’s good news, money and letter coming real soon.
• If a person bites his tongue it means somebody thinking of him
• A girl with white spots on her fingernails is inconstant in love.
• Counting money on the midnight of Dec 24th up to Jan 1 of the New Year will bring a person endless wealth during the whole year.

Filipina Culture and Traditions

*Fiesta Celebration*

• The Philippines is known as the “Land of Fiestas.” Filipino are proud to proclaim Fiesta celebration.
• Fiesta celebrated once a year for the Thanksgiving, especially to the farmers of the abundance of harvest and good health to the whole family.
• It is a time to prepare  different kinds of food, open served buffet style, guests or visitors partake of the food prepared.
• Celebrating fiesta has different kind of activities throughout the barangay and such gay affairs.
• People dance (sinulog) a native filipino dances style throughout the  street.
• There were band going around the barangay and enjoy the hospitality of the people.

*Filipino Christmas Decors*

• It is filipino tradition for children to visit their godparents and elderly relatives on Christmas Day for showing respect to his/her godmother by taking her hand to his forehead. In return he receives a blessing or a gift.
• Christmas Eve in the Philippines is one of the traditions most families celebrate. It is a night without sleep and a continuous celebration moving right into Christmas Day as December 24 dawns, the last mass of Simbang Gabi is attended, then preparations for Noche Buena take place after midnight.
• The Noche Buana is very much like an open house celebration. Family, friends, relatives and neighbors drop by to wish every family member Merry Christmas. Food is in abundance, often served in buffet style. Guests or visitors partake of the food prepared by the host family (even though they are already full or bloated.) Among the typical foods prepared in the Philippines during Christmas areL Lechon (roasted pig) pancit, barbeque, rice, adobo, cakes, lumpia, etc. There is also abundance of San Miguel beer, wine and liquor, w/c makes the celebration of Christmas indeed intoxicating.
• The streets are well lit and are full of activities. The children run in and out of the house to play and to eat. The Christmas Eve gathering provides an opportunity for a re-union of immediate and distant family members.
• Some families may choose to exchange gifts at this time; others wait until Christmas Day.
• Some families have talent show during Christmas Eve celebration. Children are asked to perform their talents.

*New Year Celebration*

• Before 12 o’clock the family prepare one glass of water w/floated 3 petals of rose flower and 3 calipay leaves inside the glass and eveyone are necessary to drink even one gulp of water for the good health.
• Every home should open alll doors and windows so that the blessings enter the house during the whole year.
• Turn on all the lights, radio and television to make any noise during the 12 o’clock until dawn so that the bad luck and bad spirit will be throw away.
• Everybody wear polka dots design clothes as a sign of money and endless wealth.
• Food is in abundance often served in the buffet style. In general, preparing food and activities is similar to Christmas celebration.
• Some families prepare fire crackers.

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…more to come. -Tim

Here is Children International’s website. Feeling down? Wishing your life had meaning? Need some good karma points or fairly sure you will bust hell wide open when you die?

Then help these Children EAT.

Yes, I know the Henry Kissinger’s of the world would like to pontificate that these are  useless eaters and that professor from Utah says the best thing in the world to happen is for Ebola to become an airborn pathogen (no kidding…I will have to look up his name as I cannot recall it. He says the HIV virus is too slow to be an effective culling agent on human population. Talk about someone with a devil on each shoulder!) but these kids are humans with minds and hopes and dreams and for $22 a month, you can give them food, clothing and some education.

Do the right thing. Go here and sign up for a kid, a kid who loves his or her parents and whose parents cannot give him all he needs no matter how hard they work in the rice fields and jungles or the fields of the land owners.

All you neocons who are against welfare? This ain’t welfare. This is YOU, a person who is CHOOSING to help with a tax deductible contribution to a good cause.

All you leftist liberals out there who are soooooooooooo concerned with helping the poor? Here is you chance to help. Do the right thing and do it with YOUR money, not others’ money  confiscated at gunpoint.

(Don’t believe me about Kissinger and his plans for genocide against third world populations? Just look up “National Security Memorandum 200: Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests” or google the terms “useless eaters” with “Kissinger.”)

I thought no one was reading my blog and said so to a friend of mine the other day. His response was that he reads my blogs and uses it to launch off onto many of the links that I include and knows for a fact that many of his friends, some mutual do, too.

Why does he never comment? Because he agrees with me.

I either ain’t got enough friends or I ain’t doing something right. Oh, well. That is okay, too.

If you want to visit a link that has a lot more light to it…and a lot more design work in it, too, then visit Liz Strauss’s Successful and Outstanding Bloggers. It is always a delightful read and lets me know that as dark as I see the world right now, there are still those who manage to see the Light in life for the most part. Yes, I wish I could see life that way, too, sometimes.

Check it out.

…I got some money ’cause I just got paid.

I am sitting here thinking about writing. Not about writing as in getting into a story, but about the act of writing and all that is involved. One advisor says I write with the perspective of a smart aleck, southern man. ‘Scuse me all to the Mason-Dixon line and back. How can this be?

Some say in order to be a writer you need to learn the craft. One fellow said write 4 or 5 novels knowing you will throw them away, that everybody has to learn. This quote that I carry around always makes me simultaneously want to lie down and get to work.

Others say, to quote my hero who shares my birthday, Winston Churchill, “Bugger everybody!” and write to your own voice. I guess if I knew who was right I would have agents and editors knocking down my door wanting to publish what I consider my crowning achievement in life, “My Heart, My Fate.”

Why do I consider it my crowning achievement? Because it is a NOVEL and it is WRITTEN and I LOVE that book because in spite of all the disappointments in my life, of all the tragedies of love lost, familial betrayals and poison so virulent it will eat through ceramic I FINISHED the thing. It is a sad fact that I am in love with the leading protagonist and often lay awake at night wishing like almighty zeigerzot that I could just pull her from the pages and into my life. I can see her, I can feel her and I can smell and taste what she tastes like when I kiss her but she is separated from me by a thin layer of wood pulp.

That plus I TOTALLY made her up. Reality is a total bother. Anyways, I am getting off target.

I am thinking about writing and what it is we are about when we are telling stories and why some get published and some don’t. I would like to get published and, sitting here thinking about it, if I could just hit lower midlist success I think I would be happy. Seeing what King is going through as the result of his fame, I am not so sure I like what I see.

Bull. I would take it in a second. I just think he is a helluva nice guy and between someone threatening him with a gun (asshole, why did you have to threaten a Maine liberal with a gun?), his getting run over by a drunk, and everyone piling on him about finishing the Dark Tower Series he is just tired. I know I would be.

Again, I am getting off target.

I finally figured out that it really is about the writing for me. I like shutting off my ears and channeling my own personal muse and seeing where it takes me. “My Heart, My Fate” is 645 double spaced pages and I didn’t plot one page. If I got tired, I stopped. Often the story would just pick up again in my head on the highway and bang when I got home I was taking dictation from myself. It is fun, this is not work and if I can figure out how to get paid to do it, I will essentially have won the Publisher’s Clearing House sweepstakes because if I were to win, writing is what I will do.

So, what is the point of this entry?

Oh, yeah. I am confused about my voice in my writing. I am confused about when to make tense changes and perspective changes that do not confuse readers. I have a sneaking suspicion that people who read the book (somewhere over 40 now) just for the story do not get confused. Then again it may be that going back over the thing and editing it myself is kind of like all the boxes I still have left over from my divorce. Yes, it been ten years now and I still have boxes I have not gone through. Perhaps if I can throw that crap away, I can sit down and edit “My Heart, My Fate.” It is as good a theory as any. Thanks for listening. I will let you know how it comes out.

(Also, on the offhand chance that “zeigerzot” means something in another language…I made the word up because I cannot come up with a good english word to convey my frustration on the issue.)

The thing about writing is that you are able to hew close to an idea with a precision that you simply cannot achieve in conversation. Why do I say that? How many times in your life have you said something to someone and it be taken the wrong way? Or your follow up was, “What I meant was…” or “That didn’t come out right.” Generally you don’t have that problem with a carefully crafted piece of writing.

At least, I like to think so. Blogging let’s me clearly put down my thinking on things and then allows me to go back to it, look at it, sharpen it up, soften it down, and, from time to time when I just cannot stand it, verbally burn the tail feathers off the maliciously and willfully stupid. Still, I do my best to avoid literary road rage as there is quite enough volume in world as it is, thanks.  

Also, I love fiction, with its License to Lie and create worlds where everything you wish to be true is. Castles can float, fireflies are actually faeries and the hollow about 50 yards to the back of your house leads to doors of light and to dungeons filled with monsters.  

You can be the hero…finally. The girl who makes you catch your breath and just stare and want and dream? You know, the one whose attention you wanted so bad you even started drinking the same sodas as her because you wanted to know what it would taste like to kiss her? Well, in your world she hangs on your every word because, of course, you are the hero of your own stories. That is, until you have to switch hats from Dudley Do Right to Dastardly Darth Vader. But there, being the bad guy is okay, if just for a while. When someone gets it right, it is the same as a symphony to me, one of events, emotions, and images.  

I love books, hence the Bear’s Book Blog title. I cannot imagine a better life than getting paid to read. Somehow, though, in middle and high school, guys who were jocks were at the top of the food chain, with the math and science club down around the upper part of the last quarter of the popularity scale. I suppose it didn’t help that no one cared if you won a writing prize. It might make it into the paper, but who reads page D42 of the lifestyles section? Not the girl I had a crush on from the fourth grade all the way to my senior year! No, :-7, I never said a word to her about it.

If you loved literature and were male there were significant concerns about you, placing you in the bottom two percent.

Anyways, let me apologize here if I make any obvious gaffs and feel free to correct me. For instance, I just loaded ALL the blog pinging sites into my options for this blog. I realize rpc.pingomatic.com updates multiple sites when I update my blog. Does it update the rest of the list? Don’t have a clue. If it does and I am hammering anybody, let me know. I didn’t see it explained that this was the case, though.

Currently I am using the default WordPress layout. I see lots of comments about how easy it is to switch themes. Even Liz, my buddy, says it is no problem to do. So, I will switch to one soon. January is bad for me. February is Valentine’s month. getting married in April….:-)

My thinking is to concentrate on the posts, working into WordPress nifty-neats gradually. Hope you will be patient with me as I work my job, build my travel business, build my network marketing business, read the books I plan to review, write, and try to figure out how to shorten the way to get my Baby Doll Cathy here.

Hi! I am Tim and many of my friends call me Bear. I am absolute freak for reading and have wanted to start a blog for some time for a variety of reasons. I wanted it to be something I could care about and give readers a reason to come back to, though.

So, while I am running around working my day job, working on starting up a company again, writing my novels and trying to figure out how to shorten the way for my Cathy to get here to the States, I researched what others were doing. Liz, at http://www.successful-blog.com/ posed a simple question:

“What three things do you talk about when you’re sitting around with your friends?”

Well, business and books and immigrating my Cathy to the states take up a lot of my time. So, as I read and work and wait, I will tell you about those books. Some I will love, some I will hate and some I suspect you will love because I hate them so.

I can get lost in books. This journal is about where I get hung up for a day…or a week and hopefully you will agree enough to make that journey too and we can talk about it.