Robert C. Day's Blog, page 37

Confucian Virtues

If you follow the principles of Ren, Li, Yi, Xiao and Xin then you will become a Junzi – and who doesn’t want to become a Junzi!

This bloke called Confucius made these guidelines up, a few thousand years ago, and they became very popular – particularly in the Eastern part of the world. That’s east of The West, just in case you wanted to visit, and you needed directions.

See if you can guess the general principles that Confucius proposed, by checking out this specically derived advice to write...

Rational / Irrational Numbers

Rational numbers are those that can be expressed as fractions and Irrational Numbers totally blew Ancient Greek philosophersaway, man!

Here are a few cool numbersabout books and the like:

3,900,000,000 – approximate number of copies of the Holy Bible sold between 1962 and 2012 (Stylist Mag) 129,864,880 – total number of books in the world as of 2010 (Google Search blog) 32,000,000 – adults in the United States whocouldn’t read when2013 rolled around(U.S. Department of Education and the Natio...

Eternal Flux

If you believe that everything constantly changes then have two ways to go with that – you can either like it or dislike it. Or maybe you can not even notice it. Or maybe you can just accept it for what it is and just get on with life. Sheesh – why is life so cOmPlicAtEd?!

Anyway – if you dislike change and seek solidity and calm then you’re probably quite boring, or maybe you’re quite upset that the world continually confounds your expectations and desires.

If, on the other hand you like all...

Democracy

Oh, to have the freedom to give away my freedom.

In terms of character development, there are two extremes:

Dictate exactly what your character willthink, say and dobefore you start writing. This will bein terms ofpredetermining all oftheir physical, mental, historical, psychological, philosophical and environmental propensities as well as deciding precisely how they will use those characteristics within the predeterminedarc ofyour story. Allow the bare germ of a story to formand then let y...

Sometimes Love

Sometimes love comes in a strange guise
Sometimes love doesn’t live in the eyes
Sometimes love isn’t there at the start
Sometimes love has to journey from the heart.

Robert C Day (inspired by Sahana onhttps://jazzlilyblog.wordpress.com/20...)

Touch Me Not

So many people here in the park, accompanied only by a phone and a book, with a touch-me-not expression stapled firmly to their face.

I Heard My Song On The Radio!!

Just got such a buzz! I was listening to a stream on Soundcloud and then, out of nowhere, one of my songs came on and I was, like, ‘hey – this sounds familiar – I wonder what it is.’ And that’s when I realised that it was something I sang, recorded and produced a couple of years ago andin my mind I went ‘wow! I love this!!’ Honestly, it was a great experience. As I sat listening to it, I was wrapped in this really nice buzzy feeling that I can still feel now.

And, you know –compared tothe oth...

Freedom of Speech

Theability to speak freely without fear of reprisals is impossible to achieve. Some bugger’s always going to be annoyed, no matter what you say. There are just too many people about with too many different points of view for us to be able to say everything that is on our minds.

Take an innocuous statement like ‘I am feeling horny today’. I mean – this is perhaps one of the most basic of feelings and is likely to occur in the minds of a high percentage of the adult population quite frequently....

Comedy

People (yes – you) tell me thatI writefunny things. I’m not really sure what that means so I went back and read some of the comments on my blog. One of these is “you are funny! Not in the ‘he-gets-me-laughing’ kinda way, more like ‘he-gets-me-laughing-but-also-gets-me-thinking’ way.” So it got me wondering – what is humour all about?

Here’s what humour is all about:

Secks. I read somewhere that some sounds are funny and some are not. For example, this is funny: ‘Killer queen guns gang and ge...

Arhat

Arhats are like actors in a play that they have decided is really, really rubbish, so theywork towards puttingona wonderful performanceon their final night;and then they leave the stage – never to return.

Shakespeare had the measure of this when he tossed out those memorablewords: “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players; they have their exits …”

Here’s how to write your own perfect part in this drama we call life:

Give. If you want to receive a Ferrari for your bir...