The Lonely Terrorist sat on a riverside bench in a suburb of New York where he had been commanded to undertake the Engagement, nursing the ancient flask containing the next step for human history, which God had given him.
Dr Samuel Otherwise was near the end of a distinguished career in the sort of science journalists don’t get to tell the half of and most they write is wrong.
Samuel had long since given up expecting anyone else to have any understanding of his work such of it that wasn’t classified anyway – or his wider ideas and beliefs. At best anyone would take it as a joke, but having totally alienated his university friends, he became overwhelmed by ennui early in life as to explaining the Plan of God with rational arguments; everyone’s false premises were so deeply engrained he could do nothing. He could not enable them to see things as God sees them, so insistent were they in seeing things as men do, applying human value judgements to everything, even the brightest and best could not place themselves outside the space-time continuum and perceive the mind of God. Continue reading “Otherwise Engaged (Short story by me for Daily Telegraph Creative Writing Competition in 2008)”→
One YouTube user who came across my Gold List method for the long term memorisation of vocabulary was kind enough to go for provide his feedback in a video on YT today.
The prophet Joel states “I’m taking a greyhound on the Hudson River line” – and this YT colleague takes his dog Frodo Baggins, which is not exactly a greyhound, but looks like a find companion anyway, out onto the banks of the beautiful Hudson river about 35 miles north of NYC. Let’s hope this beautiful and informative video about the Gold List method puts you too into a “New Work State of Mind” – or gives you a readiness to try out this new way of working with your language learning!
My heartfelt thanks to Syzygycc for giving feedback. All feedback is welcome, but such positive feedback is especially pleasurable. Negative feedback usually means that the person trying hasn’t been able to get their head around the counter-intuitive nature of gold-listing, but Syzygycc explains how he decided to give it an open-minded attempt even though he found what I was saying counter-intuitive, and was surprised at the result. This reaction occurs quite commonly. There’s also a film on my channel showing how the Australian user Lord Moggy was astounded by the results of applying the method.
There is not 100% success – because some people understand what I say in an opposite way to what I mean because a little filter in their head says – “he can’t possibly be saying that I don’t need to put effort into learning these words, just write them out the once and then don’t look for two weeks – and just treat the whole thing as a pleasurable activity in itself”? Well, I am. You don’t drill, you don’t try to learn. Ebbinghaus, the father of memory, discovered 85 years ago that you will learn 30% anyway, and then you can go ahead and learn the next 30% by doing it again. That’s what I found, that’s what this YT friend Syzygycc has now found, and that’s what hundreds more who have written comments on videos, written to me privately, or been to see me, have also said.
And, like this man says, it doesn’t cost you anything. I’m not even asking for voluntary donations – you can’t give me money even if you want to! (If you want to give something to for example an autism or a MS charity in Huliganov’s name, or to some disaster relief like Haiti, I can’t stop you, in my name, I can’t stop you there either, but that’s the only way you can pay for it.) I don’t have a paypal button up anywhere and I don’t have a price tag on it, and nobody else is allowed to either – so there’s nothing to stop you using it. All the relevant films are on the Gold List section of this blog, and you can click through on them to YouTube and get an extra portion of information from the comments written by other people.
