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I have a very good plugin in All-In-One Webmaster, which concentrates support for a number of blog-oriented websites and services, not the least of which are Google Webmaster and Google Analytics, Yahoo, etc. It puts in the meta tags and code into the blog pages to identify the blog to these services and makes it easy to register for these services if not already registered.
One of the web services this plugin supports is BlogCatalog. I went and signed up with the service and added the returned ID code into the settings page and verified the data was in the blog page. Then I waited for BlogCatalog to finish querying the website to check the tag and verify the site was there.
That was a couple of weeks ago. With a week, i got a message from BlogCatalog saying they couldn’t verify the blog, which was bogus as I could see that the required meta tag was present. I waited about another week and tried again, with the same results.
Therefore, I went to the BlogCatalog website to register a complaint. What I found was that the comment form wasn’t working, and when I tried to add a discussion about this situation, I got an almost-blank page with a message saying “An unexpected error occurred.”
If that’s the level of support BlogCatalog has for its own website, then its not worth my time to do anything further with it. I’ve removed the ID code from the settings pages and will have nothing further to do with them. Its just not worth the effort.
I just had to delete a comment which had very little to do with the topic at hand and everything to do with being a (rather pathetic) political diatribe. That kind of material has no place here and will be deleted: this is my place and anyone who wants to contribute has to play by my rules. Those rules are pretty flexible but this time the writer went way over the line. I won’t repeat what they wrote but what it came a little too close to getting referred to the authorities that I am comfortable with (and if they’d been a little more imaginative than just simply doing a search&replace job it would have been) and I’m referring specifically to a US federal department with a proven record of having no sense of humor.
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096256/]
[amtap book:isbn=B0000AOX0F]
Aliens invade Los Angeles (and by implication, the entire world) but no one notices, because of their television mind control devices. Instead, everyone is hypnotized into believing everything is normal, with continual reinforcement through just about every media venue, from billboards and magazines, even to the dollar bills in currency. Only a few people can see the truth and they are the most hunted people on the planet.
Unfortunately for the aliens, the newest person to see through the mind control haze is a drifter with an extraordinary sense of self-preservation and the back-alley fighting skills to back it up. One drifter against an entire city. The aliens are in trouble.
⇒ Continue reading ““They Live” (1988)”
Just what do airline meals have to do with hypnosis or mind control?
Well, as it turns out, a new study shows signs that sound can influence how we taste foods. Certain sounds can deaden the taste of salt and sugar, rendering foods bland and, well, tasteless. Such sounds as the everpresent background noise found in airplanes.
The inexplicable blandness of airline food has been pondered at 30,000 feet by generations of travellers. Now an explanation has been offered in the form of research showing that people lose their sense of taste when listening to the sort of “white noise†heard inside an aircraft’s cabin.
…
The findings could explain a phenomenon well known to airline companies: passengers tend to lose their sense of taste when they are in the air. For this reason, airline meals are often “improved†with extra salt, sugar and other flavourings.
This leads to an interesting set of questions: can tastes be not only depressed but improved or changed because of sounds? (It could make an interesting dieting aid, a specifically designed sound or sounds played while eating to control appetite, and that would be a more benign form of mind control.)
The scientists found that certain sounds not only affected people’s sense of saltiness or sweetness, they also influenced how crunchy some types of food sounded to the diners – which in turn affected their perceptions of freshness and palatability.
A further part of the study showed that people listening to sounds they deemed to be pleasant were also more likely to say that their food was tastier, which may explain why many restaurants play ambient background music.
This section suggests that by controlling the sounds and music of the environment, restaurants influence not only the enjoyment of the food but even influence how the food is perceived, whether it is fresh and flavorful. That’s certainly a form of subtle mind control, manipulating and controlling the perceptions of the people eating the food as opposed to allowing them to determine for themselves those questions, and while it may be to improve their enjoyment of the meal, it can also be used to cover up inferior food.
So I guess the statement here should be “Let the eater beware.”
Thanks to Derren Brown’s blog entry for the pointer to the original story here.
Its a battle of the mind controllers: in one corner, Emma Frost, the White Queen, one of the strongest telepaths on the planet; in the other corner, the Mandrill, whose enhanced pheromone power turns any female into his adoring servant. But in any such contest, the odds favor the smartest, and the Mandrill was never known for being very bright.
Description: Emma Frost was pampering herself at a prestigious day spa in San Francisco when a ruckus outside draws her attention and her ire at being interrupted. It seems the Mandrill was using his mind control pheromones to command all of the women customers at the spa to hand over all of their cash and valuables. Not that Emma has any concern for her fellow women, but she was annoyed at having her time interrupted and at the posturing pompousness of the Mandrill. Since her secondary mutation allows her to transform into a diamond-hard form that doesn’t need to breathe, the Mandrill’s pheromones have no effect on her. But his mind is like an open book to her, albeit she likens reading it to “bathing in excrement”, and that, for the poor Mandrill is just how she punishes him, by manipulating his mind. And then goes back to her spa session.
Commentary: Emma Frost never really got over being the imperious White Queen from back in the days of the Hellfire Club: she’s still haughty, bitchy, contemptuous and smugly superior, although she does reserve her worst for those who she thinks deserve it, in this case, the Mandrill.
Legalisms: The White Queen, Emma Frost, the Mandrill and their representations are copyrights, trademarks and registered trademarks of Marvel Characters, Inc.
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