Avalokiteshvara Mantra... in Klingon?

Yes that's right. I have added a Klingon script version of the Avalokiteshvara Mantra, aka the Six Syllable Mantra, aka the Mantra of Compassion, om mani padme hum, on my Visible Mantra website. This is, I believe, a world first! Why Klingon you may ask. Well I remember reading somewhere that there were now more speakers of Klingon than Esperanto. There are a number of websites which are dedicated to the language, and even a few that compare Klingon with Esperanto, and Omniglot provides a Klingon alphabet, so I thought, why not? There is no reason to assume that speakers of Klingon, or even Klingons themselves, might not benefit from hearing/seeing the mantra. I also fancy that there is a vague resemblance between Klingons and pre-Buddhist Tibetans, who were a vicious and much feared warrior race given to attacking outlying Chinese settlements and Silk Road wagon trains, and look what happened to them once the mantra took hold. Now that they've made peace with the Federation, who knows what is possible?

I've also added the mantra in the Elvish script. Actually to be accuarate I have written the mantra in the Tengwar script, using the Quenya mode. Tengwar is the script that Tolkien invented to write Elvish languages, which he also invented. Quenya seemed the better of the two main modes to write mantras in - being sometimes described as "High Elvish". The Elves have a long tradition of magic and magical words and letters, and I suspect they'd take to mantras like ducks to water. Tengwar is not an easy script to write Sanskrit in, but it's easier than, say, Japanese which has a more restricted sound pallet.

I plan to do a few more Elvish mantras, but Klingon is a bitch to do calligraphy for, so I think I'll just have the one for novelty value.

Live long and prosper __\\//

The Power of Google

Surf to "www.google.co.uk"
Type "liar"
Click on "I'm feeling lucky".

The resulting page does not contain the word liar. It would be surprising if it did, since it is the official UK Government biography of Tony Blair, the Prime Minister of the UK. How does this happen?

Well, if on my page I have the word liar linked to Mr Blair's bio, (as I do back there), then Google adds a little weight to that site wrt to the keyword liar. If 10,000 people link to a site using the same keyword, then Google starts to think that that site must be important for that keyword. Obviously at some, unspecified, threshold the page can begin to rank highly - even to the point of becoming no.1! - even though the word doesn't appear on the page at all. The Google wise will tell you that typically to rank highly for a keyword you include it in the url, title, meta-tags, headings, text, alt tags, image names, etc of your page multiple times.

So how many people must link to Tony's biography using the word liar in order to rank no.1 for a word which does not occur anywhere on the page? One can only guess at present, since I know of no application that will tell you the content of the link text that link to a page, but it must be tens of thousands of links, surely? But if you do a links check on the site Google reckons that it is linked to by "about 1150" other websites - this is chickenfeed on the web!

Maybe this another example of the Google programmers sense of humour? An example of this is to type "french military victories", and click on "I'm feeling lucky" which turns up no hits at all and asks you if you meant to search for "french military defeats" - I tried it today and it's still there. If you do an ordinary search for "french military victories" you do actually find plenty of hits. Ergo this is something programmed by a Google emp somewhere. But no, in the case of "liar" even a standard search turns up the same page.

Has someone at Google got it in for Tony? Or is it the revenge of the internet as a medium for political activism?

BTW If any of you non-brits are wondering, it is widely thought, and said, here that Tony Blair and George Bush lied about the reasons for invading Iraq, and have been lying ever since.

Violence in music

Recently in the UK, the leader of the parliamentary opposition complained that the BBC was broadcasting music which might encourage violence. This letter to the editor in the Independent last weekend, caught my eye...

Sir, I agree with David Cameron wholeheartedly in his condemnation of broadcasting by the BBC of music which may encourage violent crime. Only last month I heard a BBC transmission of music by a man called Wagner. It contained graphis illustrations of theft, robbery, incest, a number of murders and a very nasty bout of boar hunting (with chorus). There was clearly incitement to carry weapons, with spears, swords and hammers in abundance. It also glorified bling, which is one of the most distasteful aspects of society today. Well done David Cameron! Wake up BBC!

John Mackeonis
London W6

DMOZ

I'm now the DMOZ category editor for the obscure category: Society: Religion and Spirituality: Buddhism: Lineages: Friends of the Western Buddhist Order: Publications: Personal Pages. Since this more or less coincides with my FWBO People Directory it shouldn't be too arduous. I want to make sure everything on FWBO People is on dmoz.org - dmoz is used by all the big search engines, so an entry on dmoz is like submitting your website to all of them at once (eventually as some of them take their own sweet time about it). Having a website without a dmoz entry is, like, social suicide! And serious websters should edit at least one dmoz category, just as they should have a few Wikipedia pages.

The Monkey Chow Diaries

Can a human subsist on a constant diet of pelletized, nutritionally complete food like puppies and monkeys do? One man, an angry Canadian man, a foolish man perhaps, but a man none the less, has made it his mission to find out. And you thought the Supersize me guy was stupid.

Visible Mantra... reprise

OK, I have the new Visible Mantra site up and running in it's new home: www.visiblemantra.org. Thanks so much to Paul Powell for the hosting.

If there is a mantra or a seed syllable that you are interested in that you can't see on the website, please get in touch and I will see if I can do one for you. I have one commission for a 'mai.m' already and that should be on the website by the end of the week.

Visible Mantra

I've just updated the Visible Mantra website. I've added step by step instructions on writing the letter 'a' in the Siddham script - an internet first I think. I have also found some charitable hosting, so should be in a position to launch visiblemantra.org sometime soon.

Enjoy!