Basic Palmistry Part I

Palmistry is an ancient art and one that has many systems of interpretation. It is also an intuitive art that is easily learned just by learning a few basics about the symbolism that is represented by the lines that run across the palm, the mounts (or fleshy parts) of the palm and the structure of fingers.

In some systems, the right hand represents who you are today and the left hand, everything that you were born with when you came into this world. For "palmistry on the run" though it is best to read the hand that the person writes with, as that would be considered to be dominant hand.

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Divining with Ordinary Playing Cards

You don't necessarily need an expensive Tarot deck to divine the future from cards. You can use a regular deck of playing cards. All you have to remember is that the four suits equate to the following

Hearts represent love or equate to Cups in the regular deck

Diamonds represent money or Coins or Disks

Spades represent hardship or Swords

Clubs represent opportunity or Wands

Perhaps the simplest layout is a three-card spread that represents past, present and future. Or you can choose one card from the deck and meditate on its meaning for the day. I have found that an ordinary deck of cards is also easily adapted to the Celtic Cross, as well as the Horoscope Spread (which involves laying twelve cards out in a circle with each card representing what is going on in each house). Below is a quick guide to the meaning of the cards.

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Choosing, Cleansing, and Charging Crystals

I have written a lot of articles about gemstones, rocks and crystals for this site that describe which ones are best for prosperity, love and protection. If you look back in the archives here, you will find lots of information about gemstones, crystals and semi-precious stones and their magical purposes.

This article teaches you how to make optimum use of these natural allies of the spirit.

First of all, when you go to a new age or gem store, you will usually find baskets or drawers filled with various kinds of gems. Tumbled stones are usually the cheapest and feature lumpy rounded surfaces. Points are gems that have been cut so that they resemble a geometric shape or a small tower.

The most important thing is to pick up the stone and see if it feels right in your hand. One stone might feel somehow "better" than another. The process of feeling energy from an object by holding it is called "psychometry."

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Shirley Temple Stories

When the Twentieth Century Pictures company had their expensive merger with the Fox Film Corporation in 1935, studio head Daryl Zanuck was depending on two contract stars to pull the new company through its money troubles. Tragedy struck the same year when Will Rogers died in a plane crash in Alaska. Zanuck turned his financial burden on the shoulders of six year old Shirley Temple (she was actually seven but wouldn't find that out till she was twelve).

Fox had signed her in 1933, a bad year for Hollywood with record numbers of movie theaters closing throughout the country. Her ability to sing and dance was off-putting to some scouts at the studio who called her,"a precocious little monster". Later when she became their chief financial asset the attitude around the lot changed. One time little Shirley walked into the commissary and was picked up by a friendly executive," How are you doing sweetheart?" The room went quiet. Everyone was staring. If he dropped her, everyone there could lose their job. Very gently he put her down and backed away.

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Feng Shui Colors And What They Represent

Feng shui colors knowledge can allow you to choose the right colors to create harmony in any living or working space as well as it can be used with anything that involves choosing colors. According to feng shui colors specifications, colors should not be used randomly but according to what they represent.

Each one of the five elements, water, wood, fire, earth and metal are represented by different colors and that allow us to create feng shui colors based harmony. We will detail the colors each one of the elements represent through the next lines in order to help you choosing the right colors for your home or office decoration as well as the look for harmony within anything involving the use of colors.

The element water, according to feng shui colors representation chart, is represented by the colors blue and black and all their shades. This means that if, for example, you need to add more of the water element in a room, you could do so by adding these colors to it.

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My First Day as the Easter Bunny

The set is moving. There are animatronics.

No one told me there'd be animatronics
A rabbit with a busted plaster ear eternally chases cabbages,
which are inexplicably spinning, spinning.
A tiny farmer, armed with a pitchfork
( a real pitchfork, mind you,
on a children's set---madness. )
a farmer futilely tries to defend his garden.
One of his arms looks like it was broken and set wrong;
it sticks out at a weird angle.

There is fake green grass,
little white picket fences,
a shed with a big ornate garden chair for kids
to sit and pose with the Easter Bunny.
There are no kids yet.

One young guy is manning the fort.

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Drunks On The Set

As long as actors stay sober on the set, movie studios will generally put up with their off screen behavior. Colin Farell often showed up at six in the morning to work on Swat (2003) so hung over from an all night bender that his bodyguards would carry the nearly unconscious Irishman into his trailer. His co-star Sam Jackson was constantly amazed that the young actor was on time, knew all his lines and was totally professional.

In earlier days before drug testing made it difficult for studios to insure actors like Robert Downey Jr.( known to be just as professional on movie sets as Farrel) the film industry had more tolerance for drunkards. During the making of Abbott And Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), Director Charles Barton put up with Costello's antics which included starting a pie fight with Dracula (Bela Lugosi), putting a leash around the Werewolf (Lon Chaney Jr.) and walking him around Universal Studios, and pelting ad-libs at Frankenstein's Monster (Glenn Strange) so the creature kept laughing and ruining takes. A bigger concern was Bud Abbott who would get so sloshed by 2pm that he was incapable of shooting for the rest of the day. Abbott later explained that when he was young, a doctor told him that if he didn't stop drinking he'd be dead by the age of thirty. The straight man was so worried about the diagnosis he stayed drunk for the next forty years.

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Twisted Sisters

I tried not to lean against anything. Leaning, I Feared, would give the wrong impression. It could seem too casual. Sitting was also not an option. I also did my level best not to make eye contact. This was harder than it sounds. When you are surrounded by people with dentition that resembles broken picket fences and forearms adorned with jail house style tattoos (some apparently made by carving shapes into the skin then pouring India ink into the wound) it's very difficult to look anywhere other than their eyes. Fear causes this.

The name of the bar was "Twisted Sisters." I'm serious. I wouldn't lie about something this deep. The place was run by two little old ladies with deeply wrinkled faces and Tom Waits voices. When they handed you a mug of beer the obligatory "Here ya' go hon" came in a voice that sounded like it was sculpted by cheap scotch and cigarillos.

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Wintergreen

As we drove along the dirt road north of our farm one Sunday afternoon, the color of the sky reminded me of Mom's silver cream and sugar servers when they were tarnished and needed to be polished again.

Since morning, the sky had been cloudy, but now at mid-afternoon, the clouds had grown much thicker and darker. Earlier in December we had gotten a little snow. Several forty-degree days had melted most of it, and the landscape was a combination of dun-colored grass, black tree branches and the russet color of certain oak leaves.

Every year in December, Dad and I went on a Christmas tree expedition, and we were on our way now over to what we called our 'other place' to cut a tree. During the summer, I made frequent trips to the other place, a second farm my parents owned that was about a mile away, to help Dad with the haying or just to tag along when he checked on the corn or the oats or the soybeans.

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Indian Summer

It was a warm, sunny October afternoon one day when I was a kid, and as I walked up the hill of our driveway after getting off the school bus at our Wisconsin dairy farm, I wondered how many more nice days we would have before winter came.

I was still wondering about winter when I entered the kitchen a few minutes later.

"What did you learn in school today?" asked my mother, who was in the middle of peeling potatoes for supper.

Every day Mom asked what I had learned in school, although most of the time I didn't know how to answer because it didn't seem like we had really learned anything.

Today, though, I had something to tell her.

"We learned about Indian Summer," I said.

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Ghost Stories

When I started teaching English at Northwestern Military and Naval Academy near Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, nobody warned me about the ghosts.

Northwestern -- a beautiful, old granite building -- was a boarding school. A hundred boys lived there, ranging in age from seventh grade through twelfth, although the building could have accommodated maybe twice as many. The school had been in existence for about a century. The hallway leading to the gymnasium was lined with photographs of all the graduating classes

The entrance to the school featured two wrought iron gates and a long driveway that wound through the extensive grounds. Trees, flowers and shrubs added to the park-like atmosphere.

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Walt Disney's Horror Movie

In 1934, when Walt Disney called for a meeting among his artists, a rumor had spread that he was going to shut the studio down and they would all be left unemployed during the great depression. Instead he personally told them in his own spellbinding way the story of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which he intended to make into his first feature length film. It was a risk unlike any other he had taken before. The film would cost a million and a half dollars at a time Disney was spending anywhere from ten to thirty thousand on his short cartoons. Doubts came from his wife Lillian and his brother and business partner Roy, who were sure they would be in debt for most of the rest of the lives. Also nervous was Walt's backer Bank of America, who at one point interrupted the production by cutting off his credit. Then there were the heads of the other studios like MGM, Universal and Warner Brothers. They would gather for their weekly poker games at the Hillcrest Country Club and speculate that Walt, who they called "the Mickey Mouse Man", would never succeed, no one would sit still for an hour and a half to watch a cartoon. And the press referred to Snow White as "Disney's Folly".

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The One That Got Away

For years I have been listening to those commercials advising me to get my precious "Kodak moments" on film. And they always make it look so easy too.

Well, all right then, if it's so easy, why haven't I been more successful? It's certainly not because I don't have opportunities. In fact, I had a wonderful opportunity one winter day a few years ago.

Throughout the night it had been snowing here in rural west central Wisconsin, and although I knew my bird feeders were almost empty and it's part of my routine to fill them first thing in the morning, I decided to wait until the snow had stopped. The cardinals, chickadees, juncoes, blue jays, pine siskins, goldfinches, chipping sparrows, nuthatches, hairy woodpeckers--and the occasional downy woodpecker--wouldn't want mushy sunflower seeds. And besides, they still had a little bit left.

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Too Good to be True

The whole thing had started about a week earlier when I was paging through a pet catalog and came across a section devoted to dental supplies. "Simply squirt into your pet's mouth and the specially formulated solution goes to work immediately to kill bacteria and improve dental health," said the description.

At that moment, one of my cats -- who was sitting on my lap -- turned his head in my direction and yawned. A few seconds later, a blast of kitty breath which smelled like rotten tuna fish hit my nose.

"Right," I said, as I paged toward the back to find the order form.

The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that the dental solution sounded like an excellent idea. After all, it wasn't just for cats. You could use it on dogs too. And what self-respecting pet owner doesn't want her cats and dogs to have clean teeth and fresh-smelling breath?

A few days later when the box arrived in the mail, I opened it immediately.

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Spielberg vs. The Shark

While the film "Jaws" is a classic, the story behind
"Jaws" production is legendary. It's this legend that
inspired "Courage & Stupidity," a new short 25-minute film
about the making of Spielberg's classic (the title is a
reference to Spielberg's comment about what he thinks of
when he remembers the production of "Jaws.")

The film written and directed by Darin Beckstead stars the talented New York stage actor Todd Wall as the young Spielberg with a supporting role of Steven's pal George (based on George Lucas) portrayed by Aaron Fiore.

Sponsored by Panavision and Kodak film, Courage & Stupidity was shot in Salt Lake City and is a very
professional looking piece of work, as evidenced through
the crisp photography by Brian Sullivan (who was the 2nd unit cinematographer on Chris Columbus'
"Bicentennial Man.")

Courage & Stupidity had its premiere in New York City at the Queens Film Festival and screened at the International World of Comedy Festival representing the United States opening night. The film has recently been requested by Warner Brothers, DreamWorks, LucasFilm and is an official selection of 2005's Newport Beach Film Festival.

In a recent review, Movies Online wrote "Big studios and directors need to take an example from Darin Beckstead who wrote and directed this short. I would encourage people to check it out."

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Ecstasy: How Dangerous is This Wildly Popular Drug?

In February 2004 a 16-year-old girl in Connecticut went to a house party with some friends. She took a powdered form of the popular drug known as ecstasy with her friends, went into seizures and later died. In April 2004, a 14-year-old girl in California took ecstasy at a sleepover with two friends and died the next day from an overdose.

These stories are not rare-in fact, 2.6 million teens report having experimented with ecstasy in 2003 and hundreds of teens have died taking such drugs, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). Ecstasy is used by kids in their early to late teens and early 20s because it promotes a euphoric feeling by releasing a chemical in the brain called serotonin (the same chemical that, when lacking, is linked to depression).

This drug, chemical name 3-4 methylenedioxymethamphetamine, or MDMA, is different from other illegal drugs in that many kids mistakenly believe it is safe. Common among white, middle- and upper-class kids, ecstasy-also called the hug drug, beans, Adam, XTC and the love drug-is thought of as a safe way to get an intensely pleasant, high feeling.

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Thumbs Up

Do you remember how sensitive you felt about being "different" in some way when you were kid?

Maybe you were shorter than your classmates. Or taller. Or had darker hair, or lighter hair. Or maybe you wore glasses.

Well...my difference was thumbs. That's right, thumbs.

I know it sounds silly, but for a long time I envied the other girls who had petite thumbs. And yet, it wasn't until we were completing a class project one day in elementary school that I realized just how "different" mine were.

The teacher had divided us into three groups, and each group was supposed to decorate a bulletin board with a winter scene.

My group had decided to make snowmen, and since every snowman needs eyes, nose and a mouth, we elected to use thumb tacks.

I had just pushed in the first tack when a girl from my group spoke up.

"What happened to your thumb?" she asked.

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Too Young to Survive?

Eight o'clock on a beautiful June morning in southern Wisconsin. The sun was shining. The birds were singing. And I was on my way to the stable where I boarded my two horses. Little did I know that in just a few minutes I would become a "momma kitty."

As I slid open the barn door I saw the calico cat. The previous evening she had been plump with kittens, but now she was suspiciously thin, so I knew she had given birth during the night.

"After I feed the horses, you'll have to show me where you hid your babies," I said to her, scooping dry cat food into the dish.

The calico settled down for a snack and I began measuring out grain. There were six horses pastured together with stalls in this barn. I was going to let my horses in, so I figured I might as well feed all of them.

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A Comedy of Comic Book Industry Errors

Although lacking in popularity for years, the mid-50s through early 60s brought back a
resurgence of the superheroes. This in itself was not bad, especially since I like superheroes. But
as the publishers wanted to cash in on this rebirth, all other genres within the comic book
industry started to fade. The romance comics, the westerns, the hard-boiled detectives, the war
comics and science fiction comics all started to pass by the wayside.

The superhero was being driven by the market forces, which became to exist in the US comic
book industry. Suppliers and consumers alike developed an obsessive preoccupation with
superheroes, which ultimately became a detriment to the medium as a whole. By catering too
much to the limited market of superhero lovers, a much broader audience became neglected. One
analogy presented in the past was that superheroes are like really good desert. We all like desert,
but who can eat it all the time?

Another concern with this market saturation was the aesthetic merits under the weight of the
superhero longevity itself. This was not necessarily the fault of the genre itself, but of the market
upholding its lone cash cow. The very nature of art of storytelling within the superhero arena,
was greatly affected. We all have learned from the time we were young, the fundamental
elements of storytelling. There is the beginning, a middle and an end. The telling of superheroes
defies these fundamentals. There is a beginning, a continuous middle and NO end. The most
obvious (and arguably most drama killing) story telling convention is that a leading superhero
character can not die, at least, not for long.

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Stan Lee, Even the Comic Book Great Ones Have Problems

Stan Lee, in my mind, has to be one of the all time most recognizable individuals in the
"Comic Book Industry". Most lovers of comic books have known his name all their
collecting lives. For those of you who don't know his name, I am sure you have heard of
his creations. The X-Men, the Fantastic Four, the Incredible Hulk, Daredevil, and the
very well known Spider-Man are all from the mind of Stan Lee. For the last forty years
or more and as an employee of Marvel Comics, he has entertained us through the art of
comic book imagination.

Well, by now you would think that an individual of this caliber would be taken seriously
and treated with respect from his employers. Apparently not! In 2002 Stan Lee decided
he had to file a lawsuit against the comic giant, Marvel. It appears the agreement between
Lee and Marvel was that 10% of the income generated from TV and movies using Lee
characters, was to be his. Seems Marvel didn't see it that way. Typical of conglomerates,
isn't it? The boys in the suits seem to want to make all the rules. Stan at one time had
even been a suit. Among other positions held at Marvel, Lee had even been president of
the company for a while.

Years ago when Stan Lee had created most of his characters, he had done it through a
write-for-hire agreement, so he doesn't own the characters. Stan was then, just a "meat
and potatoes" kind of guy, trying to put meat and potatoes on the table. But over the
years, he was very instrumental in putting Marvel Comics on the map.

When the 10% deal was formally put together, apparently most individuals involved
didn't realize the windfall that comic book character movies would become. Now is that
any reason to hold back Stan's piece of the pie? I think not. Just corporate bigwigs trying
to increase their lot in life. Now this is just my opinion so don't rant back at me as being
unfair.

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Comic Book Industry Blunders

What has gone wrong within the industry and can it be fixed? The rape and pillage, in the eyes of
some, may have left the comic book industry gasping for life support. It seems that for an
industry that has seen so much success, the history of comic books, has apparently been
confounded by seemingly dumb mistakes.

The first could have very well been the coining of the name "comic books". The earliest versions
of the so-called half-tab (for half tabloid) reprints of the Sunday funnies (the comics) became
known as "comic books". This led to the thinking in general, that comic books contained comic
or funny material, which we all know, is a far stretch from reality. Comic books can be very
somber, dark or adventurous magazines. It has often been suggested that there should be another
term coined to better describe this literary package we all know as comic books. To date, no
other user-friend term has been suggested for use in the comic book industry.

A second misdirection came when magazine prices started to rise. Instead of increasing comic
book prices, like other successful magazines did, the comic book industry decided to cut pages to
keep the then current price tag of 10 cents. This brought on the impression that comic books
were "cheap" by definition, and neglected the fact that a dime was a lot of money at one time
(steak & eggs cost 35 cents). This presented the image that comic books were just for kids. It
also made the product increasingly

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Comic Book Collectors; Nerdy Geeks or Shrewd Investors?

When one says, yeah, I collect comic books, what is the general public response? Oh no, a slightly off the wall geek. Here is someone who has lost touch with reality. Or someone that is in his or her own little world. I think not.

Comic Book Collectors; Nerdy Geeks or Shrewd Investors?

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Television's Mysteries: The Twilight Zone of other Television Programs

It appears to me that the Twilight Zone may have affected more than the 30 minutes it controlled every week those many years ago. So with the keys of your imagination lets journey farther into the Outer Limits of television and discover that the weird and the bizarre were not just limited to the great classic sci-fi hits like the Twilight Zone and the Outer Limits.

Television's Mysteries: The Twilight Zone of other Television Programs

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Top 7 Do's for Successful Improvisation

Explains 7 principles necessary for success at the keyboard.

Top 7 Do's for Successful Improvisation

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Birthstone Origins: Stranger than Fiction

In the Old Testament, the book of Exodus tells the story of the Breastplate of Aaron, used in religious ceremonies. (Aaron…just in case you were absent from Sunday school that day…was the Biblical figure who performed, at Moses' direction, the miracles that confounded Pharaoh and his magicians.)

Birthstone Origins: Stranger than Fiction

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Walt Disney Is Coming To Town

In 1923, twenty-one-year-old Walt Disney arrived in Los Angeles fresh from the disappointment of his first cartoon studio going bankrupt in Kansas City. He went to see his twenty-nine-year-old brothe...

Walt Disney Is Coming To Town

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