Recommended Reading

Live Safely and Thrive in the Wireless Age (Central Sierra Health Resource Guide) An excellent overview of the health risks of Electro Magnetic Frequency (EMF) radiation from mobile phones, computers, microwaves and other technological conveniences - along with tips and resources for minimizing your exposure.  To access the article, follow the above link and scroll to [...]

Cashing in on a Second Home in Mexico, is perhaps the most comprehensive and informative books that you can find on investing in Mexico real estate. It is written by Tom Kelly and Mitch Creekmore. Kelly is the former real estate editor for The Seattle Times and Creekmore was recognized as “one of the foremost [...]

In tomorrow’s New York Times Book Review, 20 writers recommend works of fiction, poetry and nonfiction for the three candidates to read. Somewhat unsurprisingly, two of the writers suggest that Sen. Hillary Clinton read Macbeth. But there are a number of interesting and unusual choices.

Here are some items you can read through during your spare time:The Low Road to Victory, New York TimesThe Second Coming of McGovern, NROTake These Candidates, Please!, Philadelphia InquirerToo Little, Too Late, Dick MorrisWhy Obama Won't Win, Theo CaldwellWhy John McCain Can't Win, Bob Beckel

I recently came across an article in the Financial Times (UK) by Mark Sellers, a former equities strategist at Morningstar who manages a hedge fund, Sellers Capital, in Chicago. His piece, “Take financial talking-heads with a grain of salt,” is superb. Sellers began: Everyone acts in his or her self-interest. This is a key facet of [...]

Worth reading, we can hope as Orioles fans that the tide is finally starting to turn with only 153 games left. Maybe we can make something of this year after all...From the East Coast Bias blog.Tech Tags: baltimore orioles, baseball

Take a minute to read this great article by the Sun's George Weigel. It's a wonderful piece about the Baltimore Orioles and their "regionalism" attempt.I live in Montgomery County and grew up outside of Washington D.C., so I can understand the point of regionalism and the Oriole marketing strategy; however, considering the state the baseball team and Camden Yards is pretty much empty sans the Yankees and Red Sox are in town, it's about time that the team tries to reconnect with the city.Plus, the marketing concept is kind of old considering the Washington Nationals in the region.There are quite a few fans like me root for both and grew up loving the Orioles; alas, it would not hurt to put "Baltimore" back on the road jerseys and whatever else.I, and other fans know the Orioles play in the

Hi everyone,Here are some links to some blog posts that rock. Enjoy!PrudentiaKeeping Your Eyes Fixed on the PrizeGrilled Cheese Sandwich with Pickles (this gal is on fire!)Why Do They Trust Her?DANGER! Kimmer's new "payment plan"Maybe this is why they trust her (gasp!)Kimkins Diet ReviewIs your diet ruining your relationship?MedusaHeidi Diaz!!! I need to know about spanx!!! :spew!:A doctor struggles with anorexia and osteoporosisI Am Not Ready to Make Nice with KimkinsHeidi's trying to hold on to the money!Coffey To GoToll House Cookie Bars recipe

  Recommended Reading: A Spiritual Reading List Selected Topics   Tantra – Daniel Odier    Daniel Odier, who has taught Eastern spiritual traditions at a number of American universities, founded the Tantra/Chan (Zen) Center in Paris. (...)

Recommended Reading: A Spiritual Reading List Selected Authors Alan Watts   For more than forty years, Alan Watts earned a reputation as the most authoritative and insightful interpreter of Eastern philosophies for Western readers. (...)

Recommended Reading: A Spiritual Reading List Selected Authors Franklin Merrell-Wolff       Franklin Merrell-Wolff (mystic, author, philosopher, mathematician) grounds his philosophy and teaching not in rational speculation but in personal, direct, mystical realizations. (...)

Recommended Reading: A Spiritual Reading List  Selected Authors   Stephen Levine Steven Levine, formerly director of the Hanuman Foundation’s Dying Project, and his wife, Ondrea Levine, have been counseling the dying for over 30 years. (...)

Recommended Reading: A Spiritual Reading List Selected Authors   Ram Dass   Ram Dass, formerly Richard Alpert, was a professor dismissed from Harvard in 1963, along with colleague Timothy Leary, because of his experiments with mind-altering drugs such as LSD. (...)

For those Hillary Clinton fans, here is some recommended reading to help you get a clear picture on who this lady is and what she is about. For those of us who despise her, these books will just remind you how dishonest, controlling, self centered and dangerous some people are.Note: Hell To Pay was written by Barbara Olson, who died in 911.

Recommended Reading: A Spiritual Reading List SELECTED AUTHORS About Authors Al Link and Pala Copeland   Al Link and Pala Copeland own and operate 4 Freedoms Relationship Tantra. (...)

No matter where you are in your career, you can always benefit from keeping up with the latest literature related to career and professional development. Whether you would benefit from learning how to land the job of your dreams, how to get a promotion, or just how to function more effectively in your current career, [...]

Greg Sarchet (Bass Club Chicago, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Northeastern Illinois University) for several years has handed the following list of recommended texts out to his incoming double bass students. These books touch on all sorts of issues relating to musicians and serve as a course for developing an aesthetic sense, which is something that is fiendishly difficulty to tech but absolutely essential for creating a satisfying artistic product. Teaching technique, theory, history, ear training, and all of the other fragments that make up a musician's skill set are one thing, but the glue that binds it all together is the overall aesthetic sensibility of the musician, and this list of books helps to guide the musician down this foggy but crucial path.I have read many of the books on this list, and one of my projects for this year is to read even more of them. I think that giving students a list like this is a fantastic idea, and I'd like to thank Greg for allowing me to share this w

Of course, you should read everything I post over and over, but just in case, I would recommend you read The Want List's review of Showcase Presents Jonah Hex... which is also mighty fine readin', pardners!

In the past week, I’ve come across quite a few new travel blogs I am eager to share, however I must first recognize the end of the first blog I ever read on a consistent basis. Joe Blogs’ Conclusion - Before Joe left the UK last Summer to backpack around the world, he posted an invitation to BootsnAll forum readers to check out his blog. I decided to follow his entire trip to help me stay motivated for my own. It’s amazing how time flies! 329 days to be exact, as Joe points out in his final post. I remember eagerly reading about his first few days after he touched down in Bangkok, Thailand. I remember his feelings of loneliness in Bali, Indonesia. I remember his steady working gigs in Australia, adventures in New Zealand, and his anticlimactic reports from Fiji and the Cook Islands. I truly enjoyed the whole thing, was sad to see it end, and find it odd to have such feelings given I’ve never even met the guy! The last eleven months have been the most event

I’ve always been fascinated by de-conversion stories. I couldn’t even estimate how many I’ve read, I really can’t get enough of them. I’ve always pestered my friend Ellis14 (author of Evanescent), who was raised as a Jehovah’s Witness to write his, but he’s always been reluctant. He has now finally written it, and as soon as I read it, I realised why he’d put it off for so long. As close as we are, even I didn’t appreciate the turmoil he endured. I strongly recommend reading this, it is one of the most touching, moving deconversion stories I have ever read, and not simply because I know the writer personally. On a personal level, it filled in a missing part of my own narrative, as he went on to play a major role in my own, less dramatic deconversion. It is an inspirational tale of victory for the truth over lies, and free thought over dogma. It is worth the time to read it, and the rest.

WordPress Plugin Rob Nevilles FireStats Popular Plugin - This plugin allows you to highlight a number of your most popular posts, in a sidebar widget, based on the data collected by the FireStats plugin. Since that reporting tool was one of the first plugins I installed, it covers all of my posts from the past 5 months. Finding a way to highlight these posts to new readers was long overdue. See the left sidebar for my current top 5 most popular posts (based on total page views). Recommended Reading Brave New Traveler’s post about two travel writers getting a new TV show in Canada turned me on to two great sites for those interested in long term travel. I subscribed to both of them at work today. The first is Modern Gonzo, which is my favorite of the two. The author/traveler writes with in the style of original gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, and his website is darn well designed too. Sometimes I look at others who’ve gone before me in the ‘Round the World

Recommended Reading ComeBackAlive.com - Robert Young Pelton is a contributor for National Geographic Adventure. He describes himself as “the man, the adventurer, the writer” on his official website, which sounds curiously similar to what I put on my moo cards (traveler, writer, adventurer). The only difference seems to be my preference for sandy, tropical beaches over landlocked warzones… “His recent journeys have taken him inside the siege of Grozny in Chechnya, the battle of Qala-I-Jangi in Afghanistan, the rebel campaign to take Monrovia in Liberia, inside the hunt for Bin Laden in the Tribal Areas with the CIA, with insurgents during the war in Iraq and running RPG Alley every day for four weeks with Blackwater in Baghdad.” So, yeah, I have no desire to go where he goes, however if you’re in need of some advice for traveling off the beaten path, or to areas which you may believe to be especially dangerous (Columbia, Ethiopia, Syria), check out

Recommended Reading Saving for that once in a lifetime trip - CNNMoney.com received a question from a reader who wanted to find out the best way to save for a backpacking trip around the world. Good question! The commentator’s response was straight forward - put the money in low risk, short term CD’s and/or money market accounts. For additional suggestions, check out my series on Saving For A Trip Around the World. Travel: the new tobacco - This article was recently published in The Observer, a British newspaper. It takes a tough look at the damage being done to the planet’s climate due to ever-growing tourism and air travel. The founder of Rough Guides shares some hardcore beliefs about what needs to happen if we’re to save the Earth. Frankly, I thought his views are extreme. Still, I had this article on my mind when I added a green twist to my upcoming trip, buying carbon offsets to make up for my transportation emissions. Bear Grylls’ Blog - I

WordPress Plugins I only installed one plugin this week, however it’s a great one! Previously, I received a comment from a reader who suggested the importance of making changes that enhance communication between me and those reading, and vice versa. I’ve kept this design theme in mind the past two months. Brians Threaded Comments 1.5.9 - I first noticed this plugin in action on John Chow dot Com as it is one of his 16 recommend plugins.  Since installing, I’ve found it much easier to share my comments with individuals when there are multiple comments left on a single post.  See it in action on My Top 5 Most Hilarious Travel Photos post. On the downside, like so many of my coolest plugins, Internet Explorer 6 doesn’t seem to like it. Maybe it’s my theme. At any rate, I apologize to the 25% of visitors who use IE 6 should your experience be difficult, and humbly suggest you upgrade to Firefox or IE 7 for better browsing on my site and others. Recommen

Blog Design Updates I focused more on writing than design this past week, however I made a few key updates. Get Recent Comments allows you to post a customizable number of recent comments in your sidebar. The user name of the commenter is a hyperlink to the comments. This is a great way to draw attention to the dialogues occurring on recent posts. WP Post Ratings has been on my radar since I started this blog, however my first attempt at installation never worked out. So I was ecstatic when my second try, earlier this week, worked! The only downside has been the display in Internet Explorer 6 is problematic - the Comments section gets pushed a screen’s length down the page for some reason. Unfortunately, I’ve had other issues with IE 6, and have decided not to cater to it. This site is optimized for use with Firefox. Ultimate Tag Warrior 3 is supposed to be the bomb due to it’s flexibility. I installed it yesterday after the previous plugin I was using kept

Blog Design Updates It was a veritable orgy of Wordpress plugin updates this week. I went hog wild! Hopefully, regular readers have found value in them already. The list below excludes the ones tied to behind-the-scenes performance. Added plugin to allow as-you-type previews of comments being left Added plugin to automatically end each post with a reminder to subscribe to the RSS feed Added In-Series plugin to allow for the flexibility to create a series of posts. It automatically ties them all together for readers. See Dental Dilemma as an example. This functionality will prove especially useful once I begin my series on saving for a ’round the world trip (or anything for that matter). Added Think Free document viewer which allows Microsoft Excel documents to be viewed as HTML files. Again, this will prove useful for readers when I post my rough budget, itinerary, and pre-departure task list as it’s all in one Excel file. My plan will be shared as part of the seri

Greetings All, I have some really great stuff coming down the pipeline from the awesome contributing authors, here at The Peace Tree but today I want to let you all know about a blog I have come to highly respect and heartily recommend…This Free Nation. I checked him/her out briefly a few weeks ago when I saw a few hits from my link at this blog. I have added this site to my blogroll of daily reading because I paid a few more visits following my site meter link and every time I do, there is something worth reading. No comments…just some great insight. So check out Saorsa at This Free Nation…I highly recommend it. "Saorsa" is Gaidhlig for "Freedom" Freedom….yeah.Freedom from phone calls like the one I got tonight from an anonymous group asking me to answer recorded political survey questions framed from an extreme right wing perspective would be nice. I had to hang up…I was getting nauseated.Then you know I had to wonder, is this a new tool in the war on dome