h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

well. um.

how does one describe america? it's a lovely place for a young woman such as myself to live... i can't really imagine myself growing up anywhere else. i suppose that a lot of the time i take it for granted that everyone (supposedly) has equal rights, and we have freedom of speech... i say supposedly because we, like all countries, have our corruption and descrimination like everyone else. and in my area, we have a lot of illegal immigrants from middle america who aren't given equal rights because they aren't US citzens. it's a bit of a strain on the economy when thousands of underpriveleged people flock into the area to work for less than minimum wage, but personally, i think they really need the money.

i live in southern california, which is definitely one of the nicest places i've ever been to. i love the beach, and the nice weather. it seems to always be between 70 and 90 degrees here. not too hot, not too cold. the people... most of them are nice, some aren't... but that is a universal problem. i go to Mira Costa High School in Manhattan Beach, which happens to be a very wealthy area. unfortunately for me, i don't live there. my town is much poorer. but i get along. i get a good education (mostly through sucking up to my teachers) and i'm planning to attend New York University next fall- if i get in! *crosses fingers*

um... let's see. i suppose i am a bit of a spoiled rich kid. i have nice clothes, i share a car with my mother, but a lot of the time she takes the bus. my parents work really hard to give me everything i want, and it took me a long time to get over the selfish brat phase that lasted from my birth up until my parents went bankrupt a few years ago. sometimes things are still hard, like the need for me to have a TON of financial aid next year for college... but i can't complain. i have a really good life.

i am unemployed because i volunteer most of my time working backstage in my high school's auditorium. theater is the love of my life, so i've basically given up on the hope of having a job in the near future so that i can gain experience for my future career. i'm also a technology aid at school, which means that i work in the computer lab and learn about computers and how to maintain them and how to fix them... it's a really awesome opportunity for me, especially since computers have become important in the business world. i have recently taken up photography as a hobby, and i love it. i plan to continue doing black and white photography until... well... until i die, to be quite honest. if the theater gig doesn't work out, i'll travel the world and photograph it. i'm working on getting access to a scanner so i can show people my work.

umm... i'm lost on anything else to say... so if you have any other questions, let me know. american history isn't my strong point, but if you have questions about it, i can probably find out...

melissa

Theatre, computers, and photography, eh? That sounds like fun! I also like photography, but I can't do it too regularly because the film and development is very expensive. But I have some photo's of mine here on my page - check out my giraffe, rhino and tree photos! I took them all myself, except the one of me and the one of the black rhino - both taken by my dad. You must get a scanner - it is worth its price many times over! My scanner has served me incredibly well up to now. I have thousands of pictures I still want to put on my page - I also draw and paint. I haven't been putting up many pictures lately, because I am working hard on a portrait. As soon as I'm finished I'll decorate my page some more!

What I still would like to know about Southern California is the natural environment - mountains, deserts, rivers, lakes, the kinds of animals and birds and trees and other plants that occur there. The giant sequoias are in the north of California, right? Have you ever been up to see them?

And one last thing - do you think Bigfoot really exists?

bigfoot? well. that's a rather random question. but yes, i believe he exists. i also believe in aliens and spirits and all that good stuff.

let's see. mountains in southern california. there are a few ranges. we get some good skiing late in winter, but the snow is usually man-made because it rarely gets cold and wet enough here to snow for real.

deserts. yes, we have a lot of those. they're hot and dry. what else can i say? actually, to be quite honest, most of inland california (as well as Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and New Mexico) is desert. if you start at the coast (where i live) and drive... oh, maybe an hour and a half, you hit desert. and it doesn't stop until... the gulf of mexico area. so there is quite a lot of desert in my area. i don't particularly like it, but my dad does, and guess where all our family vacations are. uh huh. the desert.
rivers and lakes. there are a lot, actually. anytime you see green in the desert, it means there is a river nearby. the Colorado river winds through CA, and it has a lot of tributaries. and a lot of lakes. i couldn't tell you how many. but i don't particularly like them either because of all the mosquitos. yuck. (can you tell i'm a city girl?!)

animals and birds. due to the fact that CA is densely populated in my area, we don't have much in the way of wildlife (unless you count high school parties.) mostly racoons, possums, and domesticated animals like dogs and cats. in the desert there are reptiles and coyotes. in the mountains we have bears, moose, deer... and mountain lions and similar wild cats.

plants. hmm. lots of cactuses. we also have lots of trees. you mentioned the giant redwoods in Sequoia National Park. yes, i have been there. those trees are GORGEOUS. i think it's amazing that native americans used to hollow out the trunks and live in them.


let me know if you'd like me to dwell on anything. this is all superficial info... i can get better if you'd like. my friend, the encyclopedia is very knowlegeable!!!

I like deserts; I like the rocks and mountains, the clearness and stillness of the air, and the many little forms of life that manage to survive under the seemingly harsh circumstances; I like the weird ways in which animals and plants adapt to the heat and the drought. More than half of Southern Africa is covered by semi-destert or true deserts, and there is an incredible diversity of creatures that live in them. Our deserts are ancient: they have been as they are now since the time of the dinosaurs, and there are some plants that date from that time that are still around.

Yeah, I too believe that Bigfoot exists, and the same for aliens and spirits. I am quite interested in supernatural and paranormal phenomena. My dad is a dowser. I myself don't have any psychic abilities that are demonstrable, but I have a very strong superconscious awareness, in that my sense of "self" includes external reality and other people. I find my own life to be guided by meaningful co-incidences, and I often wonder if I'm not generating or tuning in to them myself, somehow.

You talked about books that are banned in schools, like Harry Potter. How about a game that is banned? I don't know if it is the case in America, but I believe it is banned in some schools. It's called the "levitation game". A subject sits on a chair. Four kids surround him/her. Each of the four kids press their palms together with only their index fingers extended and also pressed together; one pair hold their index fingers under the subject's armpits, the other pair under the bends of his/her knees. Then someone else presses down hard on the subject's head for a minute or so. After that, the pressure is released, and the four kids lift. The subject then seems to floats up into the air, and there is no impression of weight on the fingers of the kids who lift. They easily raise the subject off the chair and can carry him or her a considerable distance, supported only on their fingers in the four places mentioned. The only outwardly strange thing is that the four kids can lift the other kid with their fingers only - for a kid who weighs 132 lbs that's 33 lbs per pair of fingers; it is unusual, but not impossible. But if you are the one doing the lifting, it will feel as if there's no weight on your fingers at all! At least, the first time you do it. The first time I did it the kid felt so light I was afraid we'd throw him through the ceiling! But afterwards, it didn't work that well, and the last time I thought I was going to sprain my fingers!

It's also nice to be the subject; you really do feel as light as a feather when the pressure is released and you are lifted up into the air.

We did this in front of teachers, and they were quite amused; but I read in a book just now that in some places people are frightened by the weirdness of it and don't want the kids to do it. Anyways, I think this game ties in nicely with your interest in magic and the occasional intolerance of authorities towards it. Is it known in America?

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Here on h2g2 I have already put up lots of posts about religion. I have been looking at and thinking about different religions for a very long time. I am also interested in paranormal phenomena. I believe that the case is this: humans are intimately connected with the very fabric of reality - call it God, call it the space-time continuum, call it the quantum vacuum, call it Hilbert space, it's all the same thing. We are also all connected to each other. In a way we are all the same person. In a way, all times are the same time and all points in space are the same point. We live in a created consensus reality. This reality is created by the expectations and the actions of all of us. It is real, very real, because we have made it real. It obeys the laws of science because we use the logic of our minds to investigate it. But we can also use our intuition to investigate it, and then it appears differently.

I have heard about some pretty extreme things: people raised from the dead, the creation of "thought forms", telekinesis, visions of the future, travels to different worlds. Are these things real? They are real in the "subjective" universe, but illusory in the "objective", or consensus, universe. The universe is a complex thing, and we ourselves are complex things. Some things can only happen under very particular circumstances, those circumstances including our attitudes towards those things.

But the consensus reality we have created has had severe shortcomings. We are currently experiencing countless human and natural disasters, and this is a result of our negative world-view. So we need a different reality. Currently science is investigating paranormal stuff, and it is coming up with new theories and new descriptions of reality. If this stuff goes through, the world of the future is going to look very, very different from the one we are experiencing right now.

I believe mankind is heading towards a goal, and that it might not be too long before we find ourselves there. This goal will include the merging of prior opposites: the individual with the collective, mind with matter, the "left brain" with the "right brain", the human world with the natural world, science with art and religion. We are still a very long way from that goal, though, if not in terms of time, then in terms of our present condition. But we are now so ripe for changes that the vast changes needed can in fact happen very rapidly.

I have never heard a word bleeped out of a song over here. I didn't even know that it was done. It would ruin the music, won't it? You're right, censorship is evil. Censorship is self-defeating. It's just stupid. Do they really believe they can block out thoughts and ideas? Talk about control freaks!

Would you be interested in scientific investigations of paranormal stuff? Or fringe science in general? There's interesting info about cold fusion, for instance. If you think libraries suppressing books about witchcraft is bad, how about mainstream science suppressing a discovery that has the potential to solve the world's energy and pollution problems forever?

awful. that is totally insane. and yes, they really do bleep out words in songs because some puritanical board of directors has deemed the word unnaceptable. and the truly ironic part is that everyone over the age of 10 uses these "bad" words, and those under 10 know what they mean but haven't had the need to use them.

i would post more, but i had rehearsal this afternoon and then i went rock climbing, so my forearms feel as if they are going to fall off if i try to type too much. you should have seen me driving home!

Rock climbing? Nice! I hope you recuperate quickly!

yes, it's lots of fun. and i'm still not better! rehearsal was interesting... i had to lift heavy stuff... it didn't really work.

By the way, when I said "meaningful co-incidence" I did not imply that things happen for no reason. The opposite, actually. Co-incidence merely means when two events that seem to be related happen at the same time, for instance if I think "I am about to receive a celestial message" and the next instant I come across a book named "The Celestine Prophecy" claiming to contain a celestial message. Does that happen for a reason, or not? Either way, it is still a co-incidence.

Are there still psychics around? Dunno, what exactly is a "psychic"? Someone with any kind of psychic power whatsoever? Then my dad is a psychic, because he is a dowser and dowsing is considered a paranormal, that is to say "psychic", phenomenon. It has many characteristics in common with ESP and telekinesis. And my dad does it, no problem, I've seen him do it, he has no reason for lying about it. Also he does it low-profile because he is a university professor and doesn't need any conflicting kind of fame. My father's mother saw many people at the times of their deaths though they were many miles away. My mother's mom and dad belonged to a weird church and had visionary dreams and saw spirits everywhere. Here in Africa people talk to the spirits of dead people all the time, they see the future in patterns of bones on the ground and they kill people by black magic. Rural communities still burn witches every now and then. We have spirits that resemble the incubi and succubi of Europe. We have poltergeists. We have lake and forest monsters. We have strange lights in the skies and alien abductions. But for all of that, I have personally not experienced anything clearly paranormal aside from my dad's dowsing and my own occasional visions. Even under the best conditions paranormal phenomena happen only extraordinarily rarely. Otherwise it would be accepted as normal. Also, they have the quality that you cannot easily grab a firm hold of them, so they elude detection by the methods of the rational mind. It's the twilight zone, that elusive region between reality and fantasy. It is not something you can capture and pin down and put in a jar and admire. It is only for a very brief time that a different reality intrudes into ours, and then it is gone.

But I do believe that there is a point where reality and imagination can meet, where we can actually obtain rational, objective knowledge about phenomena that are by nature irrational and subjective. We can have factual knowledge about paranormal stuff, if we are willing to investigate them on their own terms and not impose our everyday so-called common-sense standards on them.

My own interest is not so much in magic or magick (what's the difference, unless people refer to conjuring as magic and to spells and stuff as magick?). For instance I wouldn't try to cast a spell to make me pass a test; I'd much rather study. For mundane everyday things ordinary activity works fine. But I would be interested in having healing powers, or in the ability to make seeds germinate and plants grow faster, because I cultivate wild plants for the sake of nature conservation. And there is a scientific angle also: I am highly interested in science, and the mere presence of paranormal phenomena point to extremely exciting modifications that have to be made to the general scientific knowledge base. In particular it seems that if we manage to figure out how the human mind works, we will also have figured out psychic phenomena and as a bonus we will have a way to travel to the stars faster than the speed of light! How's that? Psychic phenomena point to an interaction of the mind with the so-called "quantum vacuum". The very same kind of interaction can be used to make a propellor that can "push" against the vacuum itself to propel a space ship without the need of storing propellant on board. Or even better, the vacuum interaction can be used to alter the curvature of space to make exceedingly rapid travel and effective "anti gravity" possible. Because this interaction is a mind-like interaction, it means that starships will have to be living, thinking creatures! And the best of all possibilities is that of the "star gate", a portal directly into a different part of the universe, or even a different universe altogether!

Is this true, or balderdash? Nobody knows yet. But an open mind is needed to do the necessary research to find out! And it is incredible, but there are science-guy-types currently doing that research and talking about all of this serious-like, not as science fiction but as potential reality within the foreseeable future!

it's truly amazing... i don't know about psychics, i think most of them are fakes. my aunt claims to be psychic, but i'm TOTALLY sure she's a fraud. and what is a dowser?

the difference between "magic" and "magick" is very simple. the word "magic" has been used to mean illusionary magic or "parlor tricks" (as in rabbits out of hats, sawing people in half, card tricks- you know, tacky magicians who perform in vegas with mirrors and smoke and special effects) for so long that the word cannot really be used to mean real "magick" (as in spells, potions, conjuring and the like- the true magick practiced by witches and shamans and similar people since the beginning of time). the magickal community has taken to using the spelling with a K to show the difference between illusionary magic and real magick.

i think it's incredible that such paranormal instances occurr in africa. i mean, one doesn't really hear of them happening here, but i'm sure they do. around here, people are so terrified of things they don't understand that they simply convince themselves that these things don't exist. i really wish more interesting things would happen to me... then again, a lot of strange things happen to me every day. i'm convinced that i have premonitions. i think i might be able to read people's feelings and body language. and i'm SURE that my school's auditorium is haunted.

maybe my life isn't so boring after all!

Like I said, even here paranormal phenomena are rare. But sangomas, in the old days called "witch doctors", now enjoy official recognition and status in SA.

Dowsing is ESP using a prop. It is usually employed to find underground water. My dad uses a forked branch of the right thickness and length and then walks around till it bends downward. There is also a telekinetic element because the branch seems to bend of its own accord, with a force sufficient to strip the bark off the ends that my dad is holding. Also, it bends where it LEAVES his hands, not a place where he can easily apply force himself. But if he lets go, the force vanishes and the branch just falls to the ground. So it has to be some force he's producing himself. And water usually turns out to be where he says it'll be.

Anyways some people use different props, such as bent wires and pendulums. And some people use dowsing to find different things, such as ancient archaeoligical remains or buried treasure. Some even use dowsing on food, for instance swinging a pendulum to determine whether food is fresh or stale, or whether melons are ripe. One guy got rid of his allergies by swinging a pendulum over every kind of food he ate and discarding everything that produced a "negative" response. Some people swing their pendulums over maps to find water or buried remains, without even going to the place. I guess you can dowse for missing people as well. Does it work? Well, quite often it does. I have a huge report on dowsing that I still have to read, and my precognition tells me that this report will turn out to have found a small but very significant effect.

The "prop" in dowsing can vary, but its effect is the same: it seems to facilitate the ESP. I wonder if the spells and potions in magick are not also props, because these elements vary from culture to culture even though the basic effects are the same, and some people can even produce similar effects without any props.

i think you're right. i think that a potion or any sort of magickal working is simply a way to manifest what is inside of you. i myself have a pendulum. i, well, don't tell anyone, but i used it on the SAT's just recently as an experiment... only on the ones i wasn't sure of, and i'm still waiting for the results. should be interesting.

I wish people in general would start to become more mystified merely with everyday life, because we do live in a magical world! But people so take it for granted they can't see the wonder of it any more. I talked about paranormal stuff like ESP and telekinesis and so on, but in fact the ordinary everyday human mind itself is "paranormal" in the sense that it is beyond current scientific explanation and the weird stuff are basically just external examples of what is going on inside each and every one of us all the time!

And another thing that people still don't understand or appreciate is dreaming! I consider dreams to be mystical experiences, I make a point of trying to remember mine, and as an added bonus, since that time my dreams have become much richer, more colorful and exciting! And it has a positive, constructive effect on my waking consciousness as well. Dreaming is the gate to creativity, and humans are meant to be creative. You probably know too that premonitions often occur in dreams. There are lots of weird s**t happening in dreams which I am sure, if we knew how to interpret it right, would be quite mind-blowing and reality-altering. I just wish that people will start becoming more open to all the rich experiences that are out there (and "in here")! The majority of people live in dull grey prisons that they construct from the prejudices of their societies and their own minds; worlds of money and buildings and cars and sidewalks and roads and the brightest thing in their lives is their TV set. But the real world is one of life and love and laughter, of bright colours, of wonderful living things everywhere you look, of peace and happiness and appreciation and enthusiasm and friendship and adventure and beauty and mystery and surprise and wonder and curiosity and weirdness and myth and poetry. But most people are sleepwalkers, zombies, they simply don't see what is in front of them and they don't know what they are missing.

wow. that's all i have to say. that is so true.

my dreams are strange. sometimes i think that if i understood what they were trying to tell me, i'd have to be locked up in a mental institution.

sometimes i wonder what we would be capable of if we had use of the full capacity of our brains. after all, most people only use 10%. could you imagine using 50? or, even more, 100% of your brain capacity? the thought is mind-blowing. i personally believe the ability to be telepathic, telekinetic, and the like is hidden away in that unused 90% of our brains.

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good idea.

Here in South Africa there is also a debate about Harry Potter now. This one lady who is a writer of popular Christian books has said that the Harry Potter books are evil, and lots of people are agreeing with her. But there are also people who say that it is a whole lot of noise made about nothing. Personally I'm just sad to think that people can be so insecure that they are afraid of a fictional character! What a sorry world we live in.

isn't it though? i wrote a guide entry on that a while back. they were banning harry potter in schools.

i think it's terrible that people are so afraid of anything that is different... i could rant for hours about what happened when my school's homecoming king dropped the crown on the field and walked off... two day suspension- a punishment usually reserved for second offenses of fighting and weapons posession. *sigh*

People are always looking for evil in all the wrong places. And in the meantime there's so much evil going on right under everybody's nose: because people hate and fear themselves and each other, and because they are ignorant, they oppress and exploit each other; they are blind to their own capacity for good, they squander opportunities, they pollute and destroy nature and cause themselves and others to live in misery and squalor.

I believe it is up to the people who know better to teach and show the others that all this hatred and fear is totally unnecessary and ruinous.

Mellissa, can you tell me about the education system in the USA? Of course you don't know how it goes in all of the different schools and colleges, but . But from your own experience, what is your impression of the system? How does it work, does it work well or not? Do you
have any ideas on how it might be improved?