CHOCOLATE MOJO Video (blog4reel blogger)

Viva Fiesta!

It's back! San Antonio's biggest celebration of the year - Fiesta! We are in like the 30th year of this 10-day party binge. It's fabulous, annoying, crazy and expensive. I love and loathe it equally each year. It has spawned some of the funnest parties - WEBB PARTY - and the funniest skits - Cornyation and the best damn food you'll ever eat - special thanks to the hatted man at the WEBB party that gave me bacon-wrapped chicken, cheese & jalepeno chunks of heaven by the 2's. I would mention your restaurant but I'm afraid I can't remember it in my margarita haze. It's bound to happen during fiesta. We saw Agosto out in this melee - our infamous Jive Refried blogger who may or may not be seeing Heidi soon. We saw be-feathered men and women, wearing little else. We saw things that one should never see and one's you should never miss. I'm sad I forgot to bring my cascarones - confetti-filled eggs that are a tradition here - you crack them over someone's head and they can't get pissed, cause it's good luck. At least that's what we say.
Things to come: NIOSA (night in old (or ole, I'm not sure) San Antonio) i.e. food fest #40 for Fiesta and Cornyation - the final show - on Thursday. I'm excited. And I'm just praying I don't hit a drunk while leaving the office, which is near downtown and all the festivities. They're crazy, I tell you, like party-filled zombies drunk on the blood of Patron factory employees. I don't know what I'm saying.

On to you bloggers. If anyone's reading this, what's the deal with not putting the necessary voting link on your blog? You can't win if people can't vote for you. And people can't vote for you if you don't have the voting link on your blog. So.... we have a problem. Let me know how I can clarify it.

In the meantime.... H-A-P-P-Y F-I-E-S-T-A!

P.S. Congrats to Big Black and his baby girl. What a shocker!
p.S.S. I love the song, "Apologize" by One Republic (not Timbaland as he'd have u believe!) I've heard it about 50 times in the last 24 hrs. They used to call me Repeat 4 a reason...

BLOGWAR!

So I'm going about doing my usual blog4reel promo work.. letting bloggers know about us when I run across this Christian blogger lashing out at Eckhart Tolle and a bunch of other beautifully enlightened authors (in my opinion) just because they're classified as New Age. Christians hear that word and start frothing out the mouth. I know. I used to be one. It incensed me, I'll be honest. I couldn't help but leave a long message for the misguided woman. What really got me is she claimed to want truth. Interestingly enough, the more I learn about the history, the facts of christianity, the more I discover that so much of what I was taught as a child is absolutely NOT true. I heard recently that there is no mention of jesus in any other writings in history during the time of jesus' supposed life (besides the bible, of course). I mean isn't that strange to you? If there's some guy going around walking on water, multiplying food, raising the dead, don't you imagine someone might have mentioned him? I mean Britney Speers shaves her head - a feat to be sure - and the entire world knows about it. My friend told me I'm going to start a BLOGWAR. Maybe, just maybe, but that might be kinda fun! :)

So anyway, here's the post I left. Too harsh or tough love?

"If you are truly interested in hard-edged things such as “truth,” then perhaps you should read some books that maybe have facts that you are not yet aware of. There are some interesting essays in "You are Being Lied to (http://www.amazon.com/You-Are-Being-Lied-Disinformation/dp/0966410076) about jesus and religion. Having been raised Christian, it took me years to extricate myself from the willful ignorance that religion instills. It's hard to imagine that God as you know it may not be the judgmental, control-freak that Christians believe. Imagine God as a completely neutral presence who creates for you, and each of us individually, the reality we believe. I mean it's no more far-fetched that Jesus riding in on clouds of white to save us all from the antichrist, don't you think? And let's face it, if that did happen, our christian-based gov't would shoot him down with a missile before he had a chance to say 'hallelujah'. My point being don't talk down about things you haven't read, experienced or understood. Maybe we should all just let each other believe whatever it is we want to. Judgement is the anti-thesis of what Jesus really represents anyway. Why don't Christians get that???"

SHUNYATA

This is my new word. According to my Osho Zen Tarot book, SHUNYATA means no-thingness. Not Nothingness. What's the difference? No-thingness is not just nothing, it is all. It is vibrant with ALL possibilities. It is potential, absolute potential. It is unmanifest yet, but it contains all.

Beautiful word; beautiful concept. It goes on to say that, "In the beginning is nature, in the end is nature, so why in the middle do you make so much fuss? Why, in the middle, becoming so worried, so anxious, so ambitious - why create such despair?
No-thingness to No-thingness is the whole journey."

Why do we make such a fuss? So when I get stressed or caught up in stupid drama I'm going to use Shunyata as my new mantra to remind me. I'll let you know if it works!

I watched the 3rd Lord of the Rings last night, again. I've probably seen it 3 or 4 times. What I love about it besides the grand scope of it - peter jackson's amazing vision, the characters, and of course Tolkien's gorgeous imagination - every time I watch it I get something new out of it. Last night it was when Gandolf said, "it's the deep breath before the plunge," about the silence before all hell breaks loose.

Don't know really why it struck me except for that i feel like I'm waiting, I've been waiting for a long time for things to change. And maybe it's about to...

ELEPHANTS ROCK!

This is a link to a video of an elephant painting. I highly suggest watching the real time version and not sped up.

If this doesn't make u smile, I don't know what will....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LHoyB81LnE

And if you're into elephants as much as I am.. check this series out -
http://www.elephantdiaries.org/

I laughed. I cried. I almost booked a flight to Africa.

WEEK 1

Well we made it through week one of voting with minimal bumps and bruises... well less for me than for Tony, our website guru. Still ironing out the kinks from the site. I don't know if I've mentioned it before but our first web guy quit on us about halfway through. To come in on a site as complicated as this one halfway through is really not a picnic for anyone. I'm thankful we haven't gotten too many complaints - seems only a few people have had trouble and we've worked them out.

The last several days have been crazy ups and downs and it's a reminder that no matter what tornadic (is that a word?) mess is swirling around you that if you stay calm and centered, it will pass. I haven't quite mastered this but it gets easier every time. I think.

Some good news for the site is that I just got an email from Grayson Thagard
who does a show on CNN called "News to Me". I think it's a new show. Anyway, he somehow found out about b4r and was intrigued by it. I was so excited yesterday. Please Grayson, please! Tell the world about us! I will give you my first born, and by first born I mean a chihuahua.

In any case... life never ceases to be interesting, exhausting and surprising.

The cutest thing ever!

Appropre

I ran across a good quote:

"Latent in every man is a venom of amazing bitterness, a black resentment; something that curses and loathes life, a feeling of being trapped, of having trusted and been fooled, of being the helpless prey of impotent rage, blind surrender, the victim of a savage, ruthless power that gives and takes away, enlists a man, and crowning injury inflicts upon him the humiliation of feeling sorry for himself."

Valery, Paul
1871-1945 French Poet Essayist

If a Machine Breaks down in the Forest... who's gonna fix it?

So you know it's great being grassroots and all in theory... it goes right along with my hippie mentality but when you get to the brass tacks as they used to say, if you're not part of the machine you get eaten up by the machine. I don't know if anyone's really ever said this but it occurred to me just now. I mean even if what you're doing is the coolest fu**ing thing out there, the most heroic, the most graceful, most fun thing in the universe and cheaper than a gallon of gas, if nobody knows about you... you're like that tree falling in the forest all alone.

I am that tree.

But not really. I know I'm surrounded by amazing, talented, generous, creative, genius-like (I don't want to be presumptuous here) people all the time. I don't mean to take that for granted. But having no budget for advertising can be a little frustrating... sorry I'm just venting. That's what blogs are for, right?

But I do have a plan. I just watched the last Bill Maher episode on HBO. Great show, btw. I love Bill! Anyway, so John Cussack was on and I also do, faint, love John Cussack. I've read a blog he did for the Huffington Post. He's super political and proactive. I'm taking a long-shot and inviting him to be a Blogstar. I will send him flowers and anti-Bush t-shirts and he will love Blog4Reel.
So that's my plan. John Cussack will be a Blogstar. He'll stand on top of a mountain with a boom box playing my favorite Peter Gabriel song and he'll shout out the name, Blog4Reel. And the whole world will hear because he's JC. Accept it, John. And you too, America. I hope nobody's reading this. But if you are...

What do you think?

Any suggestions on no-budget promotion? I'm trying to post on any/every sight I can like Digg.com, etc. If you know of any, i'd appreciate the head's up! You can leave me a comment on the "comments" link on blog4reel.

Oh and Voting started this week! Very exciting. It's like watching a horse race... only not quite that fast.

Good luck peeps!

One tidbit... Agosto of the Jive Refried blog is in Chicago today trying out for Project Runway.. he made it in the top 20 last year. I'm dying to know what happened today! If you haven't checked his blog, check it out on the homepage under blogstars. I'm pretty sure he's one of the geniuses.