Category Archives: READING MATTER

Books I read & recommend

...and other stuff, ART, INSIDE THE BOOK, READING MATTER, UNIVERSES

EX LIBRIS

September 2, 2026 LRS

Books are valuable possessions. Books require thousands of hours, or even a lifetime to write, edit, and print. Before the advent of the printing press in the 14th century books were written by hand — one at a time — and only aristocrats and priests could read them. Historically, wealthy and educated persons collected books in private libraries. Each book had a label, or “book plate” placed on the inside front cover of the book to identify the owner. A bookplate, also known as ex-librīs [Latin, “from the books of…”], is usually a small print or decorative label pasted into a book, often on the inside front cover, to indicate its owner. Simple typographical bookplates are termed “booklabels”. Bookplates typically bear a name, motto, device, coat-of-arms, crest, badge, or any motif that relates to the owner of the book, or is requested by him from the artist or designer. The name of the owner usually follows an inscription such as “from the books of . . . ” or “from the library of . . . “, or in Latin, ex libris …. Bookplates are important evidence for the provenance of books.Here are a few examples of Book Plates for Greta Garbo, Douglas Fairbanks, Sigmund Freud, and others:

SEE MORE FANTASITC EXLIBRIS PAGE PLATES HERE: http://blogs.yahoo.co.jp/ayu117/folder/1067532.html

HERE IS ANOTHER LINK:

http://cdm.lib.udel.edu/cdm4/browse.php?CISOROOT=/wab&CISOSTART=1,21

INSIDE THE BOOK, READING MATTER, THE OZ FACTORS

LOGIC IN THE LAND OF OZ

September 2, 2026 LRS

Republished by Blog Post Promoter

“WHICH IS THE WAY BACK TO KANSAS?”

“I’d give anything to get out of Oz altogether, but which is the way back to Kansas? I can’t go the way I came.”–Dorothy

“The only person who might know would be the great and wonderful Wizard of Oz himself. He lives in the Emerald City and that’s a long journey from here. Did you bring your broomstick with you?“–Glinda, the Good Witch of the North

“No, I’m afraid I didn’t.“–Dorothy

“Well then, you’ll have to walk. It’s always best to start at the beginning and all you do is follow the Yellow Brick Road.”–Glinda in ‘The Wizard of Oz’

One of the primordial questions Dorothy was trying to answer in ‘The Wizard of Oz’ was, “which is the way back to Kansas?”

Trying to figure out the answers to the mysteries of life here on planet Earth is even harder than Dorothy trying to get back to Kansas–none of us have a broomstick to ride, we don’t have a good witch to ask for directions and there is no Yellow Brick Road to follow. So, we’re stuck here having to figure it out for ourselves, logically, using the information we have in our environment.

To begin at the beginning, the Land of Oz is a type of Universe. According to Webster’s Dictionary, a universe is defined as: “an area, province or sphere, as of thought or activity, regarded as a distinct, comprehensive system or world.”

The physical reality we all share on Earth and everything throughout the surrounding space is called the Physical Universe (PU).

On the other side of reality is your own imagination, your personal perceptions, viewpoints, dreams, hopes, desires, and creations, which comprise Your Own Universe (YOU).

The Land of Oz can be considered to be a Universe dreamed up by Dorothy, as conceived in the mind of L Frank Baum, the author of the book. (It has been speculated that the author created the “Land of Oz” after glancing at his file cabinet. The two file drawers were labeled “A-N” and “O-Z”. Dorothy could just as easily have been transported by the author’s pen into the imaginary “Land of AN”.)

In the movie version of the story, Dorothy creates the Land of Oz in a dream, induced by a knock on the head, using remnants of Kansas in the physical universe mixed together with creations from her own universe–which, for Dorothy, existed over the rainbow in the Land of Oz.

Every Universe seems to be made up of its own, peculiar set of Laws. The PHYSICAL UNIVERSE, for example, is built on a set of agreed upon Laws. A few examples of these Laws are:

The Law of Motion: “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.”

The Food Chain Law: “In order for one life organism to live, another life organism must die.”

The Law of Gravity: “Whatever goes up, must come down.”

The Law of Time: “Time marches on.”

Most of us take the Laws of the Physical Universe for granted because everyone seems to agree with them. However, such laws leave a lot to be desired when compared to the Laws of a Universe we might create for ourselves!

In YOUR OWN UNIVERSE you can create any set of Laws, or have no Laws at all. You can make them, change them or break them. The Laws of YOUR OWN UNIVERSE can be anything or nothing, limited only by your imagination.

In YOUR OWN UNIVERSE, everything you wish comes true, because you are the “wizard” of YOUR OWN UNIVERSE!

In Dorothy’s universe, Scarecrows and trees can talk; witches can be beautiful and fly in magic bubbles; Munchkin girls join the “Lullaby League” and Munchkin boys have a “Lollipop Guild”; horses can change their color; and, Dorothy can dye her eyes to match her gown.

Dorothy’s first awareness of the particular universe she calls the Land of Oz is the realization that she is definitely NOT in Kansas. When she opens the door to her farmhouse, which has just crash-landed in Oz, Dorothy compares her past experience in Kansas with her present experience in Munchkinland. The Technicolor flowers, a good witch in a flying bubble, all the little brightly dressed people, a yellow brick road, etc, are definitely NOT similar to anything she has ever seen in Kansas.

The Land of Oz is an example of what Earth scientists would call an anomaly. For Dorothy, the anomaly is a departure from the usual arrangement of things as compared to her past experiences. In the universe of Oz, everything is so completely different from the universe Dorothy is familiar with in Kansas that she thinks she is lost.

How do you find the way back home when you are lost?

One way is to ask someone for directions. Of course, if you’ve ever been sent on a wild goose chase by a stranger, the experience taught you that it is a good idea to be somewhat selective as to whom you ask for directions. So, how do you know who is a reliable source of directions or information?

Perhaps it would be a good idea to find out something about the person from whom you are asking directions before you act upon what they tell you. Right? (Or, is it left?)

In our example, should Dorothy be asking for directions back to Kansas from the local natives, the Munchkins?

The main reason one would ask a local resident for directions is that one makes the assumption, otherwise known as an hypothesis (which is the first step in creating any scientific theory), that someone who lives in the area will be a reliable source of information and will give correct directions.

Well, in Dorothy’s case, the Munchkins have lots of familiarity with the Land of Oz, but they have no familiarity with Kansas. Fortunately for Dorothy, they are honest enough to tell her that they don’t have a clue where Kansas is, and they pass the buck to the Wizard of Oz, who they believe knows everything. And, based on their familiarity with the Yellow Brick Road and Munchkinland, they are certain that it leads to where the Great Oz lives.

Most would agree that a certainty is better than an assumption. When one has no familiarity based on personal experience or observation, it is best not to assume that one knows the correct directions. So, one asks for information from someone one believe knows–like a scientist, for example–who is supposed to be familiar with the area or subject in question.

Do the local Munchkins or local scientists of Oz give Dorothy the correct directions to help her get back to Kansas?

When Dorothy crash-landed her house in Munchkin City, the Munchkins cowered under the bushes and flowers in terror of retribution for the death of the Wicked Witch of the East from her mean, nasty, ugly sister, the Wicked Witch of the West.

Their benevolent, all-powerful protector, Glinda, the Good Witch of the North, who the Munchkins trust implicitly, is not much help in solving Dorothy’s problem, either. To begin with, Glinda does not have all the information regarding the situation, because she was not even there when Dorothy crashed her house into Munchkin City and inadvertently killed a wicked witch.

Undaunted by her lack of factual information, the first thing Glinda does after coaxing the Munchkins out from their hiding places, is to sing them a song about her assumption, or hypothesis, regarding Dorothy’s crash-landing. She sings: “Come out, come out, wherever you are, and meet the young lady who fell from a star. She fell from the sky, she fell very far, and ‘Kansas’ she says, is the name of the star.”

So, where did Glinda get the idea that Dorothy came from a star? Dorothy never said that she came from a star! But, somehow this all seems very logical to the Munchkins. Even Dorothy doesn’t object to Glinda’s false statement!

In our analogy, Glinda’s assumption that Dorothy fell from a star could be called a scientific theory. The theory proposed by the Good Witch of the North is that Kansas is a star! This theory is based on an assumption derived from an apparent anomaly as measured against her own personal experience and by information received from the Munchkins who are supposed to be a reliable source, but, who did not actually see the house crash because they were all in hiding. In truth, none of them have any familiarity with Kansas or cyclones or farm houses or dogs or little girls, either!

To complicate matters further, Glinda has to put on the appearance that she knows what she’s talking about in front of all her Munchkins followers, even though she is really just making a wild guess. After all, she has a very good job being the protector of the Munchkins, who appear to be utterly defenseless against their enemies, the Wicked Witch sisters. Anyway, Glinda is a good witch, which means she is probably really trying to help, so, they all believe her scientific theory that Dorothy has fallen from a star.

In their cute little minds, the Munchkins have accepted, without question, the logic, which underlies the assumption that is the basis of Glinda’s scientific theory:

SKY equals VERY FAR equals STAR equals KANSAS.

This kind of reasoning process could be called “Everything Logic”; i.e., Everything Equals Everything. This sort of logic might also be the definition of stupidity.

Example: If KANSAS equaled SKY equaled STAR, one could theoretically gaze up into the heavenly firmament to watch Kansas cattle grazing on the twinkling prairies in the stars above.

Unfortunately, much of what we call “science” on planet Earth is based on “Everything Logic”.

___________________________________________

— Excerpted from the book THE OZ FACTORS by Lawrence R. Spencer

...and other stuff, ART, FREE ADVICE, INSIDE THE BOOK, LIVES, POETIC NONSENSE, READING MATTER, UNIVERSES

THE AQUARIUM CLUB

September 2, 2026 LRS

Republished by Blog Post Promoter

I am a great admirer of Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens).  After reading his Autobiography I discovered that Mark Twain became increasingly   cynical, depressed and disillusioned by the behavior of the human race.  His revolutionary books, Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer were protests against the institution of human slavery in a time when "owning people" for commonplace.  Toward the end of his life, in his 70s, Mark Twain became reclusive and bitter about the pain and suffering he witnessed on his extensive travels around the world during lecture tours.  This was compounded by the agony and personal responsibility he felt for the death of his infant son, the death of his daughters and his beloved wife.  The accumulated tragedy of his his observations and experience as a human being overwhelmed him in the end.  He died defeated by the pain of his own compassion for humanity and from the loss of the people he loved the most-- his family.

Many men who are "dreamers" and "visionaries", like Twain, are highly empathetic.  They FEEL the pain of other beings as a personal, subjective pain.  Some beings find relief from this chronic agony in drugs or alcohol.  Or, they just stop looking and caring.  Mark Twain found a temporary relief from his own pain in tobacco, humor, and a "collection" of young girls....

This article is re-posted from the Blog "Today I Found Out":
Samuel Clemens (aka, Mark Twain) used to “collect” girls between the ages of 10-16 years old.

On February 12, 1908, Clemens said, “I suppose we are all collectors… As for me, I collect pets: young girls — girls from ten to sixteen years old; girls who are pretty and sweet and naive and innocent — dear young creatures to whom life is a perfect joy and to whom it has brought no wounds, no bitterness, and few tears.”

Okay, so it isn’t actually as creepy as it initially sounds and in some ways is kind of sweet, but Samuel Clemens did love to entertain young girls.  Towards the end of Clemens life, he suffered quite a lot of hardship. His daughter Susy died in 1896 and his wife Olivia passed away in 1904, followed by a second daughter, Jean, in 1909. Clemens fell into a depression in the early 1900s and noted that while he had reached the grandfather stage of life, he had no grandchildren to keep him company. He therefore went about befriending young girls who he treated as surrogate granddaughters.










The girls in question were the daughters of couples who ran in his same social circle. He often met them on boats carting him back and forth to England or Bermuda, as was the case with Helen Allen. Allen was just twelve years old when Clemens stayed with her family in Bermuda. Her father was the American Vice-Council in Bermuda; her grandmother had known Clemens’ wife as a child. Clemens said Allen was “perfect in character, lovely in disposition, and a captivator at sight,” everything that Clemens wanted in his collection of young girls.

The group of girls were called “Angel Fish” or “the Aquarium Club.” The name is derived from the fish that Clemens first saw in Bermuda. He decided on that name because the angelfish “is the most beautiful fish that swims.” Clemens would buy angelfish pins in Bermuda and present them to each of his girls. Out of a dozen or so original pins, at least one is still in existence. It currently resides in the Mark Twain Library in Redding, Connecticut.

So what exactly did a man in his late seventies do with a bunch of teenaged girls? All manner of innocent, grandfatherly things. Clemens invited the girls to concerts, the theatre, and to his own house for card games, billiards, and reading. While in Bermuda, several of his Angel Fish had fun riding in a donkey-pulled cart with him. Clemens initially called his estate “Innocence at Home” in honour of “his girls.” He kept in touch with them by exchanging letters when they couldn’t visit, but always kept a room available and hoped to have an Angel Fish “in it as often as Providence will permit.” Before you get too much of a “Michael Jackson” vibe, it should be noted that the girls were always accompanied by a chaperone; the room for the Angel Fish even had two beds to accommodate a mother or guardian along with a girl.

Besides the room, Clemens’ house also had a billiard room which was refashioned into a sort of shrine to the Angel Fish. Above the door was a sign that said “the Aquarium” and inside the walls were lined with framed photos of each of the Aquarium Club’s members.

As innocent as it all was, if some celebrity tried to do that today, the press would have a field day with it, insinuating all manner of disgusting things, whether there was any evidence of such acts or not. In his day, it wasn’t really much of a scandal, though Clemens’ remaining daughter, Clara, didn’t appreciate the behavior, perhaps being a tad jealous. When she returned to her father’s home from a stint in Europe to find that her father had collected a group of young girls to entertain, she made her father change the name of his house to “Stormfield” and stopped the household staff from saving letters from the Angel Fish. (Today the full collection of every surviving letter can be read in Mark Twain’s Aquarium: The Samuel Clemens-Angelfish Correspondence.)

The presence of chaperones probably should have put Clara’s mind at ease, but the letters Clemens wrote to his girls would definitely raise some eyebrows today. Shortly after Dorothy Harvey’s fourteenth birthday, he wrote to tell her “I wish I could have those free-gratis-for-nothing-voyages-&-nothing-to-do-but-look-at-you every day.” To Dorothy Quick, just eleven years old, he wrote after one of her visits, “I went to bed as soon as you departed, there being nothing left to live for after that, & all the sunshine gone. How do you suppose I am going to get along without you?” The letters showed his love and devotion to his girls and the enjoyment he experienced in spending time with them, but today parents would likely have used these letters as evidence in civil lawsuits.

Despite this, only one relationship ever looked to be somewhat improper, and that wasn’t with one of his Angel Fish; further, the inappropriate overtures didn’t come from Clemens. The girl was Gertrude Natkin. He met her when she was fifteen and he was 70 in 1905.  The two exchanged letters and Natkin developed a “school girl crush” on Clemens and went somewhat overboard in expressing her affection for him through her letters. Clemens became concerned about this and distanced himself from her- his letters growing more and more infrequent, because he didn’t want to gain a reputation for impropriety nor encourage her affections, perhaps proving that he saw his Angel Fish as nothing more than granddaughters.  Certainly, at the time, an adult male courting a 15 year old girl wouldn’t have raised eyebrows, particularly if the suitor was well-to-do and not too old.  But at 70, it would have been a scandal even in that time period.

Clemens died on April 21, 1910 of a heart attack, just a few years after establishing the Aquarium Club for his Angel Fish. All in all, there were around a dozen members of the club who visited Clemens regularly until his death, but his enthusiasm for the club waned in the last year of his life; he complained that his girls were growing up too fast, complained about their boyfriends, and cut off one girl when she turned sixteen.  In the end, his fondness for them primarily lying in their innocence, as something of a breath of fresh air in a cynical world, waned as they gradually lost that defining feature of children."

...and other stuff, ALIEN INTERVIEW BOOK, FREE ADVICE, INSIDE THE BOOK, LIVES, READING MATTER, UNIVERSES

PRISON SHADOWS

September 1, 2026 LRS

Republished by Blog Post Promoter

“…all sentient beings are immortal spiritual beings. This includes human beings. For the sake of accuracy and simplicity I will use a made-up word: “IS-BE”. Because the primary nature of an immortal being is that they live in a timeless state of “is”, and the only reason for their existence is that they decide to “be”.

Each IS-BE is told that they have a special purpose for being on Earth. But, of course there is no purpose for being in a prison — at least not for the prisoner.

“The purpose of the prison planet is to keep IS-BEs on Earth, forever. Promoting ignorance, superstition, and war between IS-BEs helps to keep the prison population crippled and trapped behind “the wall” of electronic force screens.

Mystery reinforces the walls of the prison.

Imagine what might happen if all of the inmates in the prison suddenly remembered that they have the right to be free! What if they suddenly realized that they have been falsely imprisoned and rise up as one against the guards?

The prison is made of shadows in your mind. The shadows are made of lies, and pain, and loss, and fear.

The true geniuses of civilization are those IS-BEs who will enable other IS-BEs to recover their memory and regain self-realization and self-determination. This issue is not solved through enforcing moral regulation on behavior, or through the control of beings through mystery, faith, drugs, guns or any other dogma of a slave society. And certainly not through the use of electric shock and hypnotic commands!

The survival of Earth and every being on it depends on the ability to recover the memory of skills you have accrued through the trillenia; to recover the essence of yourself.”

— Excerpts from statements made by the crashed UFO pilot in Roswell, 1947

READ MORE: http://alieninterview.org/blog/