Jayarava Rave Nominated

My short essay on the Red Rite - one of the magical tantric rites - which was posted on the Jayarava Rave website in July last year, has been nominated as one of the best blog posts of 2007 (along with eight other posts). The Blogisattva Awards are run by the guy who does Blogmandu (I think). It's been a while since I looked at Blogmandu, so it was good to be reminded about it.

Highly sensitive people of the world unite!

How do you relate to these questions?

• Are you easily overwhelmed by such things as bright lights, strong smells, coarse fabrics, or sirens nearby?
• Do you get rattled when you have a lot to do in a short amount of time?
• Do you make a point of avoiding violent movies and TV shows?
• Do you need to withdraw during busy days, into bed or a darkened room or some other place where you can have privacy and relief from the situation?
• Do you make it a high priority to arrange your life to avoid upsetting or overwhelming situations?
• Do you notice or enjoy delicate or fine scents, tastes, sounds, or works of art?
• Do you have a rich and complex inner life?
• When you were a child, did your parents or teachers see you as sensitive or shy?

Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes!

If you also answer yes to these questions then you probably feel like shit. You probably don't understand why. I've found this new book by Elaine N. Aron which is shedding some light on my life. The book is The Highly Sensitive Person: How To Thrive When The World Overwhelms You. Available in all good books shops on and offline. Read it, it just may change your life, although don't blame me if you still feel like shit.

Internet Radio

This is cool: Internet Radio by Pandora : music genome project. You put in a seed artist and it plays back music from that artist and from artists which the creators have decided are kin of similar. It did throw up some interesting stuff that I'd never heard before, Tears and Fountains of Wayne for instance. However there is a heavy bias to US bands even when I put in a New Zealand artist (well I would wouldn't I?). I left it running for a while and it seemed a pretty good sound-track to my afternoon. Aliens will have to fake a US zip code - I like 90210 - because as seems to happen quite often the designers can't imagine that the rest of us don't actually live in the land of the free.

Downside is that you ca only skip so many songs per hour. I skipped 3 or 4 and got stuck with a bogus track. However reloading sorted that one out!

I'm back!

Almost 6 months since I posted anything here! I've been suffering from "non-specific upper-limb pain" which has kept me clear of the keyboard for a while. Still adjusting to life with chronic pain, some days are better than others.

My current fav site is "What Tarot Card are you?" - which is actually available in lots of places but this one comes near the top on Google. I am The Heirophant (apparently) and the Heirophant's purpose, according to the website you understand, is "to bring the spiritual down to earth".

I'm in the process of moving FWBO & TBMSG News onto WordPress which is fun. The new site will launch in a few weeks and feature an FWBO blog aggregator - with 20 blogs on it and only three of them mine (which is partly why I thought I'd better write something here.

Oh and I have a MySpace site now for what it's worth. See you.