We as a race of people are always fascinated by Heroes. As children and as adults, we love to read super hero comics and watch movies about super heroes. The theme of most successful move involves heroes of some sort, doing something out of the ordinary and something heroic. It captures our imagination and sweeps us up into a land of fantasy. Heroes are things of legend. Right?

What if that is not true. What if we all have the capability and the capacity of being a hero. Doing something extra ordinary. Saving people and making a difference in the world. Wouldn’t that be an amazing world to live in? Well guess what. It is the world we live in; and it is possible for every single one of us to be HEROES.

Welcome to the word of Dr. Philip Zimbardo. Dr. Z as he is affectionately called by his students is professor emeritus at Stanford University where he has spent 50 years teaching and studying psychology. Philip Zimbardo is one of the most distinguished living psychologists, having served as President of the American Psychological Association, designed and narrated the award winning 26-part PBS series, Discovering Psychology, and has published more than 50 books and 400 professional and popular articles and chapters, among them, Shyness, The Lucifer Effect, and The Time Paradox. He is best-known to the public for his controversial Stanford Prison Experiment that highlighted the ease with which ordinary intelligent college students could cross the line between good and evil when caught up in the matrix of situational and systemic forces.

He has made it his life time goal to study human behavior; specifically what makes people do “bad” things, and what makes people do good. His latest book the “Lucifer Effect” explores this in detail. In his book he talks about Lucifer (commonly known to all of us as the DEVIL) In fact, Lucifer was god’s FAVORITE angel until he disobeyed god and was banned into HELL. Hows does someone so good. Someone so pure; go from being the very representation of good into being the very representation of evil?

Dr. Z, says that heroes are not born heroes. They do not have special powers. Its their belief and the situation that makes a hero. By studying heroes over time; both the famous heroes of history past and newer everyday heroes from around the world he is convinced that “EVERYONE IS A HERO IS WAITING” Given the right situation we all have it in us to shine and do heroic deeds. Even something like taking some time to teach the elderly and non tech savvy how to use the internet or the computer can make you a hero. You are the person you are helping’s hero. Standing up to domestic abuse can make you a hero.

Dr. Z talks about this at his 2008 TED appearance where he introduced the idea of the Heroic Imagination Project (www.heroicimagination.org) or HIP for short. The Heroic Imagination Project (HIP) will inspires ordinary people to trigger extraordinary social change. HIP is based on the insight that all people have the capacity to act heroically, and that it’s possible to prepare anyone to be a hero when called upon.

I mean what an amazing goal. The more i read about and learn about this project, it just makes me happy. It makes me happy because i truly this that something like this could have an amazing impact on peoples outlook. HIP plans on introducing school based curriculum to educate middle and high school children about heroism. Image, a new generation of children brought up with the knowledge that they can be heroes. That helping others is the correct thing to do. This does not mean to go out and act irrationally, but to know what is right. From what I gather; frameworks and modals are being developed that will allow teachers to analyze heroes of the past and teach the underlying principals the guided that person to do something heroic. Those same principals can be used in everyday life by us, whether its standing up to a school bully, or helping an elderly person cross the road.

It all comes down to DOING THE RIGHT THING.

I wish Dr. Zimbardo and the whole HIP team all the very best in this endeavor and here’s to a better and brighter tomorrow!

Source: www.heroicimagination.org

The details are as follows.

According to the Zimdiaspora, the 18 year old teenager was running an errand for his boss at a shopping center in Chitungwiza , New Zealand Zimbabwe. As he pulled into the parking lot, 3 women in a car pulled up next to him and forced him into their car. They then proceeded to take him to a church and lock him up. One of the women then came in and forced him to have sex with her.

The story then goes on to say that she called up his employers wife to let her know that he was safe and not to worry about him…

WAIT A MINUTE.

Did I just read that correctly? How did she know who his employer was, and more than that, what his employers wife’s number was? This sounds a little fishy to me.

What do you’ll think?

Ohh.. so the women let him go the next day by driving him to another shopping center and letting him out.

There used to be a time (not too long ago) were having a day named after you or after a particular purpose actually meant something (eg: Martin Luther King Day, Veterans Day, etc…).These days of meaning seem to have seen their last light of day.

It seems as if every day is some sort of obscure day, or every week is some sort of week or every month is some sort of month.

Its at a point where its starting to get annoying. I mean, seriously. Give a dude a chance. I’m still trying to get leave to celebrate Chinchilla day.

I digress.. back to books. I love them. I love to sit down and have a nice read. You know actually thumb through the pages of a real book instead of scrolling through pages on a monitor.

Books are expensive to keep buying and once you have bought a book, how many times do you really read it? I have a bunch of books and at most i’ve read a book 2 times. Renting is totally the way to go.

I wrote about a cool new startup called Rentalic a little while ago. Well this is perfect. People with a whole bunch of books can list their entire library out on Rentalic and rent them out to other users.

To visit Rentlic go to www.rentalic.com

We need a national rent your books out day!

I just finished reading an article on BBC News that The Rancho Bernardo Inn, a “Luxury Resort” here in the United States was offering rooms that usually start at $219 for as low as $19 a night. I understand that part. That’s actually a damm good deal. It’s this next part that I don’t understand.

The room starts at $219, but the resort will then reduce the price of the room for each amenity you don’t want in the room.

The cheapest deal – $19 – means guests sacrifice a bed, breakfast, air-conditioning, towels, toilet paper, a mini-bar and lighting.

Staff will even unscrew the headboard from the wall – but leave a small tent.

Wait, did I read that right? They even take out the toilet paper (a roll costs less than $0.50. Probably much less when they buy it wholesale).

General manager John Gates said that during tough economic times it was a way to help people stay at a nice resort who normally could not afford to.

So you take everything nice out of the room so its worse than a 2 start dump (last I checked even 2 star motels gave you toilet paper) and think your giving people a way of saying at a “NICE RESORT“?

What makes even less economic sense is that your room is going empty anyway. So instead of letting someone stay there at $19 with full comfort (which might actually convince the person to come back and pay full price) you increase your overheads by getting your staff to strip the room on a per client basis, so they can stay in a TENT IN AN EMPTY ROOM with NO toilet paper and expect them to come back and pay full price next time???

DUDE, WHAT ARE YOU SMOKING?

Source: BBC News.

When the LTTE struck, they struck indiscriminately. When they bombed public transport, they killed Sri Lankans. There were Sinhalese, Tamils, Muslims, Burgers, and Malays who suffered as a result of their attacks.

Extract from His Excellency’s speech:

“‘Our aim was to liberate our Tamil people from the clutches of the LTTE’  – President

“The war against the LTTE is not a war against Tamil people; Our aim was to liberate our Tamil people from the clutches of the LTTE; Our heroic forces have sacrificed their lives to protect Tamil civilians; The victory we have gained by defeating LTTE is the victory of this nation and the victory of all people living in this country. Protecting the Tamil speaking people of this country is my responsibility. That is my duty. All the people of this country should live in safety without fear and suspicion. All should live with equal rights. That is my aim. Let us all get together and build up this nation”, said H.E the President and Commander-in- Chief, Mahinda Rajapaksa delivering the opening address at the historic Parliamentary fourth session today (May 19). 2347708 “

We must never forget our armed forces who sacrificed everything to free all Sri Lankans from terrorism and to give us this chance of rebuilding out nation.

The Api Wenuwen Api Fund is a collaboration between the The Ministry of Defence and the Central Bank of Sri Lanka to build 50,000 houses for the serving Tri-Service personnel. In an effort to help raise money for this fund Mobitel has teamed up with one of Sri Lanka’s most talented artists Ranidu, to create the Sebelaneni song. 100% of the proceeds raised from this song will be donated to the Api Wenuwen Api Fund, so I urge everyone to help out.

The following information about the song is provided from the press release taken from defence.lk

The ‘Sebalaneni’ song is available exclusively on Mobitel m tunes (caller ring back tone) and Mobitel customers can now select this song as their mTune by typing “21212″ and SMSing to 777. This service would be available at a fee of Thirty rupees per month and proceeds from this service also contribute to the ‘Api Wenuwen Api’ fund.

The music video of ‘Sebalaneni’ would be available in DVD format at all Mobitel outlets in the near future and all proceeds from the sale of each DVD is to be contributed to the ‘Api Wenuwen Api’ fund.

Mobitel customers would also be able to further contribute to the ‘Api Wenuwen Api’ fund by downloading ‘Sebalaneni’ Ring – tones from wap.mobitel.lk and also by downloading ‘Sebalaneni’ Wallpapers from wap.mobitel.lk in the near future.

‘Sebalaneni’ was composed and sung by Ranidu Lankage, while the lyrics were written by Anuradha Uduwage and the music video was directed by Subash Pinnapola.

It’s a “stage managed” Photo Shootout. Look right ; The girl shoots Victims actions with a Smile, using a Semi Professional Camera ( Nikon D Series …..? in the No Fire Zone – VELLAMULLIVAIKKAL……!!! ).

What an ACT. That’s the reality of LTTE’s (and Tamilnet’s) News.

All major News Papers in the world published only the first photograph…….!!!

The LTTE is known for using their own people who they are supposed to be fighting for as HUMAN SHIELDS source: Statement from the United Nations via the Daily Mirror. This includes children, women and the elderly.

“…council members [the united nations security council] “strongly condemned” the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), who are apparently using civilians trapped in a 5 square mile (13 square km) strip of land as human shields…” – U.N. Ambassador Claude Heller

Remarks made by the President of the U.N Security Council.

this is all good and dandy.. but the bottom line is that they are going to spend USD $500 million to “make the building green” and only save USD $4.4 million a year. so that’s going to take about 113 years to cover up the USD $500 million. these are all very rough calculations. the article does not talk about the cost of disposing of all the old appliances and fittings etc… that will come out of the building.

this just looks like a HUGE publicity stunt to use the buzz word of going green. i mean if you really want to do somethign to benifit the environment, why dont you take that USD $500, 000, 000 and do something meaningful, like plant a rain forest, or help save an animal speciece that is going extinct, or something like that. Feed some starving children in Africa and Asia.

However these female monkeys have been observed flossing their teeth using human hair in the same way that we humans floss our own teeth. furthermore, researches from Japan also noticed that the mothers spend double the amount of time flossing when they were being watched by their infants. This suggests that they were deliberately teaching their young how to floss.

[link]

WOW.. This is really cool. monkeys can teach their young how to do things. What is even cooler is that they FLOSS. I mean how many humans floss?????

i’m betting that a lot of the people out there right now, criticizing Phelps has also smoked some marijuana at some point in their life.

its part of growing up. let the kid experience life and grow up. he seems to have a solid grounding and just because he smoked pot once does not mean he is a pot head. it just means he is finding his way as all kids do, and that means learning things for themselves.

please don’t get me wrong, i am in no way saying that what he did was right. all i’m saying is that by putting all this pressure on him your paving the way to failure. its the same reason that most kid star actors end up as washed up druggies. its because of all the pressure put on them. lay off.. and let the kid grow up as a regular person.

don’t you have better things to report on? you as the media are reporting on this story because you say he is a role model and on the moral issue and the message he is giving out to his fans. what about your[collective media] moral issues? i mean after all all your doing is creating a story out of nothing to fatten your wallets. i find that quite hypocritical.