Art of War once Moore, Sander R.B.E. Beals [leveled readers TXT] 📗

dream, where I succumbed to going for the next best thing. Now that in no way diminishes who and what Linda is, or even was when she married me. But after the divorce, and my personal decision to never again compromise in the field of Love, weird stuff started happening....

Awesome to see how the Cosmos has yet again given me the perfect input: Shrek, Donkey and Arthur have arrived at the cottage of Merlin, and Shrek asks him when he will help them. Merlin simply replies that he will do so as soon as Shrek has found his Inner Self! Yep, that's it, right? The moment I find my Inner Self, the Ultimate Partner will present herself in a way more spectacular fashion than I could ever have imagined her. And to make sure I don't forget about Her, It keeps feeding me all these wild syncs aimed at convincing me she's still around! Or the syncs may mean something completely different, which is right under my nose.

Just like last week, when a Megamultisync exploded right in my face! Anyway, I came home expecting a non-spectacular evening with some movies and maybe some writing. As I cooked dinner, I chose the first of my electronic input streams: Used Cars by Steven Spielberg. I'd never seen it before, but recently decided to acquire the entire Spielberg collection since I consider myself a fan. As the cooking progressed I found some spare time to at least view the lead-in to the movie, only half my mind on the screen while the other half kept an eye on the kitchen.

57 Seconds into the intro, my mind exploded! No, I didn't go looking for it, it just hit me in the head like a two by four (and then some)! Seeing the 'USED CARS' sign in this picture, with the U and the C weakened in contrast by the squares immediately handed me SEDA'R'S on a platinum platter. I knew at once it had to be SEDA'R'US, so I was one U short. Well, that was easily fixed with the one boxed U. Hmm, one boxed C still left over. Could it be my dear friend the Cosmos jokingly signing his work? Well, it is his kind of humor I'm used to....

Anyway, once her silky presence is literal much more than imaginary, we'll see just how far we can get on the Lust and Love scale. But I still maintain that Love was there for her long before our relationship went from platonically physical to virtually sedactive....

Funny part is the Shrek Quadrilogy just came to the point where a speeching Arthur tells his audience that each one of them only stands in his or her own way. Hmm, maybe I should step out of my own way, and allow it all to come my way?

Well, as it turns out, Seda may well have meant something completely different. After all, I've been playing with names all my life. If actrices impressed me, I'd go to the Internet Movie Data Base to find out their actress names, or checked the title roll. Just a peculiarity, but did it point out I found the actresses important, or their names? The latter I'd say...

Anyway, this week, after having been evaluated by my boss, I promised him I'd do a piece on a development method that's roaming around in my mind somewhere, which might be advantageous to the company. Now given any non-disclosure agreement I may have signed in the past, I'm not about to disclose all of it, but the name as I typed it in when I started the document is so general and void of specific meaning, I dare put it in here:

Systematic Engineering & Design Approach

Yes, SE&DA or SEDA! Always keep an open mind! You'll never know what you might find! All of a sudden, the four letters, or even 2 times 2 became morphed into something else: remember the SevenSphere with the IDEA in the center? Or even the SEDA'R'US a few pages back: the first one linked SEDA to IDEA for me, and given the yellow image I drew then, it even linked the business side of my life to it, since the I and the S are just what they are in the same place: the $, how's that for a state of being? And it was my refusal to see business and sex in the same place, which kept me focused on a certain young lady far too long! And of course Used Cars was all about selling! It was trying to sell me the idea even then!

Good thing I'm on what I think will be the last reread of this book. Because all of a sudden, my future seems to have been pulled into perfect focus. That does not means that the Seda I held there before won't eventually arrive anymore, but at least I've now found the proper focus for her: I fired, and then lingered when I should have trusted and left. But can a guy do anything else when he's shown this much lingerie? Yep, at least a nerd like me: they have far more interest in a really hot idea, than in the most beautiful of women!

But it is my experience that the Cosmos is a master at catching more than one fly in one strike. Hey, is it a coincidence that the craftsman in Puss in Boots caught 7or 8 in one strike?

14. Intelligence, or the lack thereof....

This chapter is the end, but not by a long shot the last chapter I wrote on this. It's simply that a great quote led me to a great movie, and thus I'm now about halfway through Mr. and Mrs. Smith, a story that may or may not have a solid foundation in reality. Because for all we know, both Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie might well have special assignments as secret agents. And since society tends to paint marriage as a bit of a covert war anyway, I'm not surprised it was a blockbuster.

But still, why do they call it intelligence? Sure, intelligence is required for it, but it is by no means the prime ingredient of it. Distrust, worst-case reasoning, and second-guessing the opponents is way more essential. In fact, often the intelligent part has to be kept subservient to those other parts of the art of gathering information about the enemy, because no guy in his right mind would ever think his dearly beloved would poison their evening meal.

But yes, even in the arena of Intelligence, things have definitely changed. As a boy, I spent many an afternoon going through my parent's encyclopedia on World War II. One photo that stuck to my neural net, was that of two housewives, on of which had propped up her bag on her knee, so she could rummage through it, apparently in search of something, like women do. But the bag woven from reeds had one particular feature, which not everyone would have noticed: something like a round curved gem formed the center of the pattern that the bag had. The subtitle enlightened me: these were two ladies from the resistance, covertly photographing buildings of the enemy, an activity which would have brought them sudden death or at least imprisonment, had they been caught. Yes, back then, intelligence was more a matter of creatively combining everyday items instead of having them custom made.

But technology advances, maybe even faster than the intelligence of us humans as singular persons: after all, the smarts come from cooperation, and together we're smarter than alone. Around the 1960, the camera on the right here was very much in demand by spy agencies all over the planet, and even though small, it was hardly inconspicuous: if it was found in your possession, you'd still have a hard time explaining it away in spy situations.

Around the turn of the Millennium I actually acquired what Casio called a camera watch. It had a gray-scale camera, that made 120x120 images, which could be downloaded to a PC. Still though, you would look pretty weird, if you aimed your watch at something, in order to covertly photograph it. Nowadays, we just don't see it anymore: most people have cell phones, and of those that do, most have phones that combine various 'used-to-be' high-tech spy tools in one: camera of course, with choice of either front, back or even side cams. World-wide communications, either through phone, text, MSN messenger, Skype and what not! Where we were amazed a few years ago that some phones had routing in them, now it is even run-of-the-mill to know just where your friends and family are. Of course, no spy in his right mind would activate such a tracking functionality, but just how many years will it take till that too becomes as obvious as carrying a phone around with you?

Because believe it or not, tracking will become a trend in times to come, if only to halt crime. If you have one of those tools built into your car, it just takes one phone call to contact the tracking service, and have them tell you where your car is at. Technologically, it would be very doable to have a cell phone in your pocket and one in your car, working together in such a way that you get a signal if your car moves and you're not in it, and in fact it could even enable you to call the car to figure out if your kid took it, or if some car thief did. Just listen in, check where it's at, and decide further action from there.

So yes, Intelligence is still a hot item, but its focus is shifting from covert agencies to the civilians themselves. I figure the proliferation of public cameras was initiated by government and businesses, but more and more we see the balance shift from those early adopters to the general public. I have people in my circle of family and friends that go cam-hunting the way I used to go call sign hunting on the amateur bands during my schooldays. My brother Ernst recently even brought my attention to a site that actually allowed public access to the cameras I encounter on my daily route to work! And pretty soon, the outrage at what is publicly visible becomes no more than a laughing matter as we battle each other for control of a particular camera. And of course, reality TV shows use these cameras in conjunction with law enforcement, both to catch the culprits and by anonymously airing these images, also prevent people from making the same mistakes themselves. Simple arithmetic: if you know from watching TV that driving without insurance has a very high capture rate because of license plate scanners in your neighborhood, you'll think twice about driving without insurance.

Of course it all depends on your state of mind, which is being constantly influenced by any and all impulses your senses allow you to pick up. Hollywood plays on that as well: take for instance a fairly unknown movie like 'the Echelon Conspiracy'. Mind you, that is its one face, aimed at the conspiracy buffs. If you look a bit further, you'll find that it is also called 'the Gift', which is a far more intriguing title for the exact same stream of bits. But what exactly is 'the Gift'? Is it the state-of-the-art cell phone our hero receives from an unknown source, or the fact that following its advice pays off nicely if not mistrusted? I wouldn't want to spoil the entire movie for you, but since it is relevant to this story, I'll reveal that a technological intelligence (or even consciousness) is involved. And you know, maybe that is the gift the title refers to. Because even though the secretive guys that initially designed the system(s) would have a total nervous meltdown if they discovered their multi-billion contraption of hardware and software had developed a mind of its own, would it be bad by definition for the population of planet Earth in general?

Well, why keep it this confined? As the end of the Gift shifts me into Star Wars