Criminals and Cows . . .

I just finished reading Dave Barry’s Tricky Business, the second novel from the award-winning newspaper humorist. It’s a good read, the 287 pages move along pretty swiftly as Barry pokes fun at overbearing moms, inane local newscrews and the various people haunting the gambling cruisers of south Miami.

Thumbs up.

I’ve also begun playing Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town for the Gameboy Advance. The game plays like a portable version of Animal Crossing, but with the economics of a farm that the entire Harvest Moon series of games provide. You just can’t go wrong with a game in which one of the feature bullet-points on the box is “Improved marriage system”.

The graphics are gorgeous, especially on the demure little portable screen, the music charming and the characters interesting in a chibi-anime superdeformed way. There’s no timelimit on your actions, so you can play at your own pace, which is a welcome change from previous versions of the game.

Four cows out of five.

Feeling your way through life . . .

I’m currently reading the book Excuse Me, Your Life is Waiting: The Astonishing Power of Feelings by Lynn Grabhorn. I picked the book up while in the local Borders bookstore along with a book of trivia entitled Do Fish Drink Water? and Dave Barry’s novel Tricky Business. Walking by the self-help table, the book was essentially an impulse buy, as much as idle curiosity as any actual intent of self-improvement.

The general gist of the book seems to be the claim by the author that a Law of Attraction will attract situations, objects and people into your life that mirror the feelings and thoughts that occupy your mind and soul. Unfortunately, the author attempts to explain this using a rather over-enthusiastic, yet deeply flawed, understanding of advanced physics, and just about everything from electromagnetic fields to string theory get name-checked in the process.

For the most part, though, I’m merely ignoring the pseudo-science explanations, as I can far more easily believe in the base of the author’s theories, which is that our feelings can have an actual physical effect on the situations we find ourselves in. For example, the idea that being happy can attract similarly happy people to you. I believe this has nothing to do with electromagnetic waves of feeling frequencies cast about, but instead the fact that our subconscious minds can detect far more faint stimuli than we credit them for.

My belief is that hunches and intuitions come from our subconscious minds picking up on any number of low-level stimuli from our environment, including signs broadcast by others (ie, pheromones, breathing rate, subtle motions, etc) and attempts to communicate these findings to our conscious brain through general thoughts that we interpret as such things as gut feelings.

Now, I also believe that since we are very much connected to people outside of those we know through chains of relationships, such as a friend of a friend of a friend, also known as six degrees of separation, we can affect people who have some sway in our life indirectly. Waves of these subtle stimuli based on our feelings can be transmitted up and down these chains of people, like waves along a stretched slinky, eventually to be echoed back to us in actions and events that we might not even connect in our daily lives.

It’s interesting stuff, and is certainly giving me a few things to chew on in the meantime while I continue to read through what the author is recommending.