I'm sure everyone here already reads the Spark, but I often find it to be compelling and thought provoking reading, so I had to link to it.

I'm reading a rather interesting book by Daniel Pinchbeck, called "Breaking Open the Head." It's an exploration of psychedelics and modern shamanism. This is his site. And, yes, his site is going into my Entheogens Folder.

I think that a lot of the problems of our modern world can be traced back to the fact that we no longer have a tradition of spiritual use of psychedelics. What traditions we do have, we have to borrow from other indigeneous cultures. My theory is that without reverent use of psychedelics, we become wrapped up in our own egos. We become selfish, basically.

In relation, Mike wrote an interesting article about the Drug War.

"The first and most idiotic claim which the bottom rung of the anti drug movement makes is that all drugs are alike. Of course, generalization is the tool of the ignorant, but in this case the behavior, in large part a result of out and out lies from government and religious groups mixed with a constant pressure to encourage absolutely no research into the subject matter, has resulted in a population so astoundingly ignorant of the matter they oppose that it makes it difficult to even converse with them." -Michael Heaney

Okay, I know it's a FARK link, but I can't resist it. It seems that the Germans have had to ban sex on the battlefield.

This is a big problem?

I had 83 total plays on my Abstract Sound Collective site this morning. I have 104 now. That's pretty cool.

Brotherjames.net is a cool community blog that a friend of mine is involved in. Check it out.

"These weblogs provide a valuable filtering function for their readers. The web has been, in effect, pre-surfed for them. Out of the myriad web pages slung through cyberspace, weblog editors pick out the most mind-boggling, the most stupid, the most compelling."

And this is why I think we need a new word, 'blog' or 'weblog' for instance, instead of the word 'journal' to describe blogs. They're different from straight ahead normal journals, or at least, they can be.

Participatory media, if you will.

I don't work at a Borders bookstore, but I still find this interesting.

Why do they call them doughnut holes? They're not really holes. The holes stay in the doughnuts.

I guess it would be too wierd to call them doughnut plugs.

The only thing cooler than monkeys are robots.

In relation to an earlier post about 1000 blank white cards, I found a cool game called Party Chess. Party Chess is basically a chess variant, played within a game of Nomic. Nomic is basically a self-modifying game, where the players change the rules as they play.

I think it could make for an exquisite party game.

I've been rereading Dune by Frank Herbert. Here's something he wrote about where the idea for Dune came from:

"I conceived of a long novel, the whole trilogy as one book about the messianic convulsions that periodically overtake us. Demagogues, fanatics, con-game artists, the innocent and the not-so-innocent bystanders-all were to have a part in the drama. This grows from my theory that superheroes are disastrous for humankind. Even if we find a real hero (whatever-or whoever-that may be), eventually fallible mortals take over the power structure that always comes into being around such a leader."

If you like the Dune series, here is a cool site that should have almost all the information you would want to know. If you haven't read the Dune series, then you really really should.

Also, in the first movie version, there was a scene where Gurney Halleck, played by Patrick Stewart, was playing the balliset. If anyone out there knows where I can find an mp3 of that, let me know. It's not in the DVD or any of the VHS tapes, that I know of.

So, I was watching TV, and NBC had a commercial for their new show, American Dreams, or whatever. I noticed that they were using the score from Dragon: the Bruce Lee Story, in the commercial. I've noticed that that tune gets a lot of use, lately.