The Woggle-Bug Book features the broad ethnic humor that was accepted and popular in its era, and which Baum employed in various works. The Woggle-Bug, who favors flashy clothes with bright colors (he dresses in “gorgeous reds and yellows and blues and greens” and carries a pink handkerchief), falls in love with a gaudy “Wagnerian plaid” dress that he sees on a mannequin in a department store window. Being a woggle bug, he has trouble differentiating between the dress and its wearers, wax or human. The dress is on sale for $7.93 (“GREATLY REDUCED” reads the tag). The Bug works for two days as a ditchdigger (he earns double pay since he digs with four hands) for money to buy the dress.
He arrives too late, though; the dress has been sold, and makes its way through the second-hand market. The Bug pursues his love through the town, ineptly courting the women (Irish, Swedish, and African-American, plus one Chinese man) who have the dress in turn. His pursuit eventually leads to an accidental balloon flight to Africa. There, menacing Arabs want to kill the Woggle-Bug, but he convinces them that his death would bring bad luck. In the jungle he falls in with the talking animals that are the hallmark of Baum’s imaginative world.
Posted in Books.
Tagged with animals, Ditchdigger, Flashy Clothes, Frank Baum, Humor, Imaginative World, The Woggle Bug Book.
By admin
– March 9, 2010
Although James Allen is more widely known for his As a Man Thinketh, it is the lesser known The Way of Peace which reflects more accurately his New Thought Movement affiliations, referencing as it does Christianity, Buddhism and Hinduism.
The book is essentially a treatise on the importance of meditation as a ‘pathway to divinity’. Whatever we meditate upon, Allen explains, we become. If you meditate upon ‘that which is selfish and debasing, you will ultimately become selfish and debased’. Whereas if you meditate upon ‘that which is pure and unselfish you will surely become pure and unselfish’.
Posted in Books.
Tagged with Exploration, Good, James Allen, Life, Meditation, New Thought Movement, Self, The Way of Peace.
By admin
– March 9, 2010
The Turn of the Screw is a novel written by Henry James.
An unnamed narrator listens to a male friend reading a manuscript written by a former governess whom the friend claims to have known and who is now dead. The manuscript tells the story of how the young governess is hired by a man who has found himself responsible for his niece and nephew after the death of their parents. He lives in London and has no interest in raising the children. The boy, Miles, is attending a boarding school whilst his sister, Flora, is living at the country home in Essex. She is currently being cared for by the housekeeper, Mrs. Grose. The governess’s new employer gives her full charge of the children and explicitly states that she is not to bother him with communications of any sort. The governess travels to her new employer’s country house and begins her duties.
Miles soon returns from school for the summer just after a letter from the headmaster stating that he has been expelled. Miles never speaks of the matter, and the governess is hesitant to raise the issue. She fears that there is some horrid secret behind the expulsion, but is too charmed by the adorable young boy to want to press the issue. Shortly thereafter, the governess begins to see around the grounds of the estate the figures of a man and woman whom she does not recognize. These figures come and go at will without ever being seen or challenged by other members of the household, and they seem to the governess to be supernatural. She learns from Mrs. Grose that her predecessor, Miss Jessel, and Miss Jessel’s illicit lover Peter Quint both died under curious circumstances. Prior to their death, they spent most of their time with Flora and Miles, and this fact takes on grim significance for the governess when she becomes convinced that the two children are secretly aware of the presence of the ghosts.
Later, Flora runs away from the house while Miles plays music for the Governess. They notice and go to find her. The governess and Mrs. Grose find her in a clearing in the wood, and the governess is convinced that she has been talking to Miss Jessel. When Flora is forced to admit this, she demands to never see the governess again. Mrs. Grose takes Flora away to her uncle, leaving the governess with Miles. That night, they are finally talking of Miles’ expulsion when the ghost of Quint appears at the window. The governess shields Miles, who screams at her as he attempts to see the ghost. The governess tells him that he is no longer under the control of the ghost, and finds that Miles has died in her arms.
Posted in Books.
Tagged with Curious Circumstances, Ghost Story, Gothic, Henry James, The Turn of the Screw, Yound Governess.
By admin
– March 9, 2010
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is a children’s novel written by L. Frank Baum.
Dorothy is an orphaned 12-year old girl who lives in a farmhouse in Kansas in the year 1900 with her Uncle Henry, Aunt Em, and little dog Toto. One day the farmhouse, with Dorothy inside, is caught up in a cyclone and deposited in a field in the Land of the Munchkins in the Land of Oz. The falling house kills the ruler of the Munchkins, the Wicked Witch of the East.
The Good Witch of the North comes with the Munchkins to greet Dorothy and gives Dorothy the Silver Shoes that the Wicked Witch of the East had been wearing when she was killed. In order to return to Kansas, the Good Witch of the North tells Dorothy that she will have to go to the “Emerald City” or “City of Emeralds” and ask the Wizard of Oz to help her.
On her way down the road paved with yellow brick, Dorothy frees the Scarecrow from the pole he is hanging on, restores the movements of the rusted Tin Woodman with an oil can, and encourages them and the Cowardly Lion to journey with her and Toto to the Emerald City. The Scarecrow wants to get a brain, the Tin Woodman a heart, and the Cowardly Lion, courage. All are convinced by Dorothy that the Wizard can help them too. Together, they overcome obstacles on the way including narrow pieces of the yellow brick road, Kalidahs, a river, and the Deadly Poppies.
When the travelers arrive at the Emerald City, they are asked to use green spectacles by the Guardian of the Gates. When each traveler meets with the Wizard, he appears each time as someone or something different. To Dorothy, the Wizard is a giant head; the Scarecrow sees a beautiful woman; the Tin Woodman sees a ravenous beast; the Cowardly Lion sees a ball of fire. The Wizard agrees to help each of them, but one of them must kill the Wicked Witch of the West who rules over the Winkie Country.
As the friends travel across the Winkie Country, the Wicked Witch sends wolves, crows, bees, and then her Winkie soldiers to attack them but they manage to get past them all. Then, using the power of the Golden Cap, the Witch summons the Winged Monkeys to capture all of the travelers.
Posted in Books.
Tagged with Brave, Dorothy, Emerald City, Frank Baum, Great Story, Scarecrow, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
By admin
– March 9, 2010
Book Excerpt:
“Would you find that wonderful life supernal, That life so abounding, so rich, and so free? Seek then the laws of the Spirit Eternal, With them bring your life into harmony.
How can I make life yield its fullest and best? How can I know the true secret of power? How can I attain to a true and lasting greatness? How can I fill the whole of life with a happiness, a peace, a joy, a satisfaction that is ever rich and abiding, that ever increases, never diminishes, that imparts to it a sparkle that never loses its lustre, that ever fascinates, never wearies?
No questions, perhaps, in this form or in that have been asked oftener than these. Millions in the past have asked them. Millions are asking them to-day. They will be asked by millions yet unborn. Is there an answer, a true and safe one for the millions who are eagerly and longingly seeking for it in all parts of the world to-day, and for the millions yet unborn who will as eagerly strive to find it as the years come and go? Are you interested, my dear reader, in the answer? The fact that you have read even thus far in this little volume whose title has led you to take it up, indicates that you are, that you are but one of the innumerable company already mentioned.
It is but another way of asking that great question that has come through all the ages — What is the summum bonum in life? and there have been countless numbers who gladly would have given all they possessed to have had the true and satisfactory answer. Can we then find this answer, true and satisfactory to ourselves, surely the brief time spent together must be counted as the most precious and valuable of life itself. There is an answer: follow closely, and that our findings may be the more conclusive, take issue with me at every step if you choose, but tell me finally if it is not true and satisfactory.”
RALPH WALDO TRINE
Posted in Books.
Tagged with Life, Millions, Money, Principles, Ralph Waldo Trine, Secret, Success, Wonders, World Seeking.
By admin
– March 9, 2010
Thuvia, Maid of Mars is a science fiction novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Carthoris is madly in love with Thuvia. This love was foreshadowed at the end of the previous novel. Unfortunately Thuvia is promised to Kulan Tith, Jeddak of Kaol. On Barsoom nothing can break an engagement between a man and woman except death, although the new suitor may not cause that death. Thus it is that Thuvia will have none of him. This situation leaves Carthoris in a predicament.
As Thuvia suffers the common Burroughsian heroine’s fate of being kidnapped and in need of rescue, Carthoris’ goal is abetted by circumstances. Thus he sets out to find the love of his life. His craft is sabotaged and he finds himself deep in the undiscovered south of Barsoom, in the ruins of ancient Aanthor. Thuvia’s kidnappers, the Dusar, have taken her there as well, and Carthoris is just in time to spot Thuvia and her kidnappers under assault by a green man of the hordes of Torquas. Carthoris leaps to her rescue in the style of his father.
The rescue takes Carthoris and his love to ancient Lothar, home of an ancient fair-skinned human race gifted with the ability to create lifelike phantasms from pure thought. They use large numbers of phantom bowmen paired with Banths (Barsoomian lions) to defend themselves from the hordes of Torquas.
The kidnapping of Thuvia is done in such a way that Carthoris is blamed. This ignites a war between the red nations of Barsoom. Will Carthoris be back in time with Thuvia to stop the war from breaking loose? Will Carthoris’ love ever be requited by the promised Thuvia?
Posted in Books.
Tagged with Adventures, Ancient, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Green Man, Hordes, Lifelike, Maid of Mars, Phantasm, Thought, Thuvia.
By admin
– March 9, 2010
Wuthering Heights is Emily Brontë’s only novel.
The name of the novel comes from the Yorkshire manor on the moors on which the story centers. The narrative tells the tale of the all-encompassing and passionate, yet thwarted, love between Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw, and how this unresolved passion eventually destroys them and many around them.
The novel is narrated by Mr Lockwood, who also takes a subsidiary role in the action. His housekeeper Nelly Dean, provides a secondary narrative, embedded within his.
Lockwood relates how, in the year 1801 he arrives at Thrushcross Grange, a grand house on the Yorkshire moors that he is renting from the unsociable Heathcliff, also master of nearby Wuthering Heights. Visiting the Heights to greet Heathcliff, Lockwood is treated rudely and coldly by its inhabitants, whose relationships with one another he does not understand. After attempting to leave and being attacked by the household’s dogs, he is forced to stay overnight. In his overnight room he finds the diary of a girl named Catherine Earnshaw, and learns that she was a close childhood friend of Heathcliff. After falling asleep, Lockwood has a terrifying dream of Catherine’s ghost appearing at his window and begging to be let in. As he struggles to keep her out of the room, Heathcliff, awakened by Lockwood’s shouts, enters. Upon hearing of Catherine’s ghost, Heathcliff asks Mr. Lockwood to leave the room and as he stands outside the door, Lockwood hears Heathcliff sobbing and saying, “Oh Cathy, please come in.”
The next morning, after returning to Thrushcross Grange, Lockwood asks the housekeeper, Nelly Dean, to tell the story of Heathcliff, Catherine, and Wuthering Heights. Nelly Dean takes over the narration and begins her story thirty years earlier, when Heathcliff, a “gypsy” from the streets of Liverpool, is brought to Wuthering Heights by the then-owner, Mr. Earnshaw, and raised as his own. Both Earnshaw children, Catherine and Hindley, initially resent Heathcliff, however Catherine and Heathcliff become inseparable. Her brother Hindley continues to hate and physically abuse him seeing him as an interloper and rival for his father’s attention. When Mr. Earnshaw dies three years later, Hindley, by this time married to a woman named Frances, inherits the estate. He brutalises Heathcliff, forcing him to work as a hired hand. Catherine becomes friends with the neighbouring Linton family who live at Thrushcross Grange, who mellow her wild personality. She is attracted to the refined, mild, and young Edgar Linton, whom Heathcliff instantly dislikes.
Posted in Books.
Tagged with adventure, Emily Bronte, Gothic, Inspiration, Mystery, Old, Supernatural, Wuthering Heights.
By admin
– March 9, 2010
Excerpt:
Any way the old world goes
Happy be the weather!
With the red thorn or the rose
Singin’ all together!
Don’t you see that sky o’ blue!
Good Lord painted it for you
Reap the daisies in the dew
Singin’ all together!
Springtime sweet, an’ frosty fall
Happy be the weather!
Earth has gardens for us all,
Goin’ on together.
Sweet the labor in the light,
To the harvest’s gold and white
Till the toilers say “Good night,”
Singin’ all together!
Posted in Books.
Tagged with Forces, Money, Ralph Waldo Trine, Strength, Success, Thoughts, Thoughts I Met on the Highway.
By admin
– March 9, 2010
Through the Looking-Glass is a work of children’s literature by Lewis Carroll.
On a snowy November night, Alice is indoors playing with her kittens — a black kitten and a white kitten, the offspring of Dinah, Alice’s cat in the first book — when she ponders what the world is like on the other side of a mirror’s reflection. Climbing up on the fireplace mantel, she pokes at the wall-hung mirror behind the fireplace and discovers, to her surprise, that she is able to step through to it to an alternate world. In this reflected version of her own house, she finds a book with looking-glass poetry, “Jabberwocky”, whose reversed printing she can read only by holding it up to a mirror. She also observes that the chess-pieces have come to life, though they remain small enough for her to pick up.
Upon leaving the house, she enters a sunny spring garden of talking flowers, who mistake Alice for one of their own and introduce her to the “bread-and-butterfly” and other bizarre insects of the Looking-Glass world. Elsewhere in the garden, Alice meets the Red Queen – now human-sized, and slightly taller than Alice – who impresses Alice with her ability to run at astonishing speed. The Red Queen reveals to Alice that the entire countryside is laid out in squares like a gigantic chessboard, and offers to make Alice a queen if she can move all the way to the eighth rank/row in a chess match. Alice is placed in the second rank as one of the White Queen’s pawns, and begins her journey across the chessboard by boarding a train that literally jumps over the third row and directly into the fourth rank, acting on the rule that pawns can advance two spaces on their first move.
Posted in Books.
Tagged with Alternate World, Garden Flowers, Lewis Carroll, Magic, Sunny Spring, Through the Looking Glass.
By admin
– March 9, 2010
Book Excerpt:
“[ Seeing with “Half an Eye"]
Things are continually happening all around us that we see with but “half an eye.” They are in the “fringe” of consciousness, and we deliberately ignore them. Many more things come to us in the form of sense-impressions that clamorously assail our sense-organs, but no effort of the will is needed to ignore them. We are absolutely impervious to them and unconscious of them because by the selection of our life interests we have closed the doors against them.
In either case, whether in the “fringe” of consciousness or entirely outside of consciousness, these unperceived sensations will be found to be sensory images that have no connection with the present subject of thought. They therefore attract, and we spare them, no part of our attention.
Just as each of our individual sense-organs selects from the multitude of ether vibrations constantly beating upon the surface of the body only those waves to the velocity of which it is attuned, so each one of us as an integral personality selects from the stream of sensory experiences only those particular objects of attention that are in some way related to the present or habitual trend of thought.”
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Posted in Books.
Tagged with Hidden Powers, Money, Success, Super Mind, The Trained Memory, Treasures, Warren Hilton.
By admin
– March 2, 2010
Animal Life – Mammals PRO
Animal Life Vol. I
CoffeeIn
Emergency Preparedness Checklist
Multiple Mentality Course