four steps to mindfulness, grammarian monkeys, for the love of a car, and wal-mart gets twittery

We will be really random here and see what we can put together: this eccentric schema will continue for four or more posts- which is how it should be- life is really random, order is imposed through hindsight.

Therese J Borchard has an article on Mindfulness at Psychcentral. She discusses Dr. Elisha Goldstein's four steps to mindfulness: calming exercises (breath work and a body scan), mindfulness of thoughts (Keep a watch on your thoughts, but don't forget that they are temporary images and are not permanent facts), mindfulness of emotions (gently feel where the emotions are in the body, simply observe and describe them as they come and go), and the wandering mind ('We want to actually turn our attention to where it has wandered to, acknowledge it, then let it be and gently bring our awareness back to what we want to be focusing on in the moment.').

There is more to it than this, and we hope you take the link and read it for yourself.

BBC has an article that says that monkeys can appreciate grammar (we don't- we can't even identify the good and bad kind).

In the journal Biology Letters, researchers said that cotton-top tamarins are able to spot if the order of syllables in a word is "wrong".

They familiarised the monkeys with two-syllable terms, and recorded their reaction to words that were not consistent with that syllable pattern.

The team says the work illustrates how many animals use patterns that have become intrinsic to human language.

I think the monkeys here recognise sound, not meaning- but however, who are we to say that meaning is not implicit in sound? This is mysticism, and we are totally unequipped to deal with that.

We have read about lovelorn people, haven't we? Their story is the stuff blockbusters are made of.

With its velvet interior, 330 horsepower engine and a positrack differential that was perfect for making his wheels squeal, no car has ever matched the 5-year-old one he bought for $1,600 when he was 16. Papa John Pizza founder Schnatter -- in town to wave the green flag for the Coke Zero 400 -- said he'd be happy to get any original piece of his car.

-news-journalonline

The car is Gold 1972 Z28 Camaro and he is willing to part with a quarter million dollars!

Some of us have bureaucracy ingrained in our genes- and if we are a corporation, in our culture- this is LOL stuff: more from The daily irrelevant by John Sinteur:

Only lawyers, EULA collectors and legal obsessives will find this funny, but it cracked me up: care to access the 140-character pearls of wisdom streaming forth from Wal-Mart’s Twitter account? Well, first you have to agree to the 3,379-word Terms of Use agreement that comes with it. I know, I know, a lot of big corporate entities on social networking sites likely put forth equally verbose TOUs, but — a “Twitter Discussion Policy“? Awesome overkill. It all starts here.

The daily irrelevant is a great blog, and we are happy to give links to it.