Our 'Guest-Feature' series continues with another great essay from active magician Taylor Ellwood. If you want to learn more about Taylor and his great writings, you can check the links at the bottom of this page, or listen to Episode 13 of the show in which he did a great interview with us...   The Power of Being Open in Magic   In one of my recent articles, I discussed the path of least resistance and how it can work within a magical model. In this article, I expand on how this paradigm works by examining how being open can simplify both your relationships with other people and with magic itself.   One of my philosophies when it comes to interactions with people and interactions with magic is fairly similar and based on understanding that the less complicated a situation is, the easier it is to navigate the situation. This isn't to say that magic and people aren't complicated. They can both be very complicated, but a situation doesn't have to be complicated. Ideally if you remove the complicated factors that you have control of in a given situation, it consequently sets a person at ease, or in the case of magic, makes it much easier ...

Each week we send our Queen of the Weird, Claire Lumiere, into the wilderness of the Internets to find the weirdest reports from the Underground, CounterCulture and the Paranormal mileau! If you have news that you feel demands the attention of the SittingNow community then drop us an email at wwn@sittingnow.co.uk    The BBC reports that a large study on near-death experiences is soon to be carried out on cardiac arrest survivors. The study, coordinated by Southampton University will take about three years and is going to investigate whether people without brain activity or heartbeat can have ìout of body experiences.î Head of the study, Doctor Sam Parnia, says, "If you can demonstrate that consciousness continues after the brain switches off, it allows for the possibility that the consciousness is a separate entity.   Within just ten years, Australia's other favorite marsupial might be extinct. Researchers say that Tasmanian devils are plagued with a facial cancer that their bodies simply don't recognize. Zoos are being turned to for breeding while scientists are working on a vaccine to prevent the cancer. If interested, on the zoo's website is a link to donate to the conservation of the species.   On a similar note ...

Title: Hanson Brothers - 'It's a Living'  Label: Wrong Records/Southern Records Released: Available Now Format: CD/DVD & Double Vinyl         I love it when I get pleasant suprises, and this the latest opus from NoMeansNo's oddball Bar-comedy-punk side-project The Hanson Brothers, has plenty of them!   The first thing that surprised me was my own lack of any observational skills, and how I should probably eye-ball the press release a bit before slamming CDs into my Mac. This CD has a DVD on the otherside, which really baffled for a second! (I had put the disk in the wrong way!)    First up, the music! THB play a blend of punk rock that harks back to the good-ol days of the Ramones and The Ruts-era Punk, but with the added twist of cleverly placed (and actually funny) odd-ball comedy. The CD is setup to sound like a live radio-session, interspersed with band interviews and rants, which actually works really well. If, like me, you are a fan of NoMeansNo, you will instantly recognise the 'sound' of this record...in fact this kind of reminds me of their earlier releases, but with more of a, dare I say, comedy-concept.    The DVD, which I ended up rewinding once I realised my mistake, is, ...

Just when you thought it was safe to crack out your copies of Dianetics and Top-Gun, whore yourself on YouTube and generally be dramatic online; Anonymous returns with an EPIC triple-whammy!... Well, just as Operation Chanology seems to be gasping its last breath, a symptom of internal civil war (old vs. new, vs. moral), Anonymous have risen once again to show us all that the Internet Hate Machine is still active and processing 'lulz' for us all to laugh at! A week or so ago, Anonymous managed to use the 'forgot password' option on Yahoo! Mail to gain access to hockey-mum-republican Sarah Palin's email account. The ensuing reposting of private information (Dox), caused an unusually high level of coverage from the likes of Fox News buffoon Bill O'Reilly and his minions.   Watching Bill attempt to justify his obvious rage-management issues is always a source of great amusement: Challenging the Internets? BAD IDEA!   Sure enough, a few days later O'Reillys website was hacked and it's 'premium' members personal details were smeared all over the internets like a peadophile 'named and shamed' campaign! It was later revealed that O'Reillys web people contacted the afflicted few, informing them of the breach.   That's all? ... nope!   Oprah Winfrey, lover of ...

  The Montauk Monster that supposedly washed up in the Hamptons might be only one in what could be a longer line of bizarre unidentified creatures washing up on shores all over the world. And more recently, in New London a so called "Clapsadle Carcass" had been discovered. "Had" because the carcass is supposdly no where to be found. ______________________________________________________________ A seven year old boy in Australia went on a reptile killing spree at a zoo this past Wednesday, slaughtering 13 animals in total. He was caught on cameras throwing rare reptiles into the crocodile enclosure over a security fence. Zoo officials are currently looking into suing the boys parents since he is too young to be charged. ______________________________________________________________ The oldest known footprint may have been found. The tracks, if legitimate, belong to an animal that lived 570 million years ago. The discoverer says that he expects and welcomes skepticism, but if the find is real, then it would apparently push the advent of walking back 30 million years earlier than any previous solid finding. ______________________________________________________________ According to a new report by the National Cancer Research Institute, patients who are suffering from quote “unfashionable” cancers are being neglected by scientists ...

Best known for his editing role on Monty Python's 'The Life of Brian' and special effects man on Terry Gilliam's 'Brazil', Julian Doyle returns with his B-Movie take on Aleister Crowley in this years 'Chemical Wedding'. Deciding not to take the biographical role, and instead envisioning Crowley in a modern setting, the film took a panning by critics, and Crowley fans alike. We sent in our man, Adrian Dobbie, to find out what Doyles motives and reactions were behind the film... Resurrecting the Beast I've only been in the company of ex-Monty Python collaborator Julian Doyle for half an hour or so but already the conversation has been surprisingly brisk. So far we've discussed the Osirian symbolism behind the story of Abelard and Eloise, the influence of early Christian Britain on the Roman Empire before Constantine and the idea that giants built many of the Neolithic stone circles in the British Isles.  Oh and we've touched on quantum theory too. Just a little.   I'm at Doyle's North London home to interview him about the movie Chemical Wedding, which alongside Iron Maiden frontman Bruce Dickinson, Doyle co-wrote, directed, edited and produced. To date, Chemical Wedding is by far the most ambitious and commercially successful ...

Taking the Path of Least Resistance in Magic If there is one challenge that magicians face when it comes to determining the effectiveness of magic, it is figuring out if the magic you performed aligned with your internal values. Sometimes, even if we think we want a particular result, we actually don’t want that result. Speaking from personal experience, I always found it odd when I would do a successful act of magic and get the result I desired, but then have the impact of that result not really count for handling my situation. It was only much later that I would recognize that the magic I did at that time was going counter to my internal values. I’ve also noted this type of occurrence with other magicians: they would get results, but when those results were not in alignment with their internal values an essential part of them rejected the results.   Recently I read a passage that I would like to share, which speaks to this issue, “Magick defines suffering as the result of straying from one’s natural path of ‘least resistance’” (Schueler 1988, p. 222). Suffering arises from straying from one’s natural path of least resistance. This is an interesting ...

In this age of online-piracy, where big US companies like ComCast are strangling consumers bandwidth privileges, who can the big software houses and Internet providers call on to reach the kids of tomorrow? Well, back in the early 90's, it wasn't Superman or Batman that protected classics like Monkey Island and Wing Commander 2. No, it was a bad-ass rapper, come super-hero that the really reached out to the kids.  In this 'caught on camera' expose, witness the mighty 'Double Def' preventing two innocent kids from taking their first steps into a life of crime: If the Internet-Police had such speedy countermeasures today, we could all rest easy! Little is known of what happened to the MC, however it is rumoured that he was accidentally deleted in the late 90's, whilst trying to stop a kid from copying Quake...for shame...he wasn't just def...he was DOUBLE def! Ken Eakins

This is no joke! The benches have apparently been installed to celebrate the city of 'Stavanger', which is apparently Norway's cultural capital. As ridiculous as this may look, however, the music offered includes tracks from the amazing John Kaada, who happens to come from the apparently culturally-rich city, and this lady seems to dig him, so she's ok with me! Hmmm, well, I'm just trying to figure out if the dog has some special dog-orientated ear buds down there? source www.dagbladet.no/

And... we're BACK with the Weekly Weird News. This time, there's going to be an audio version you can listen to (but it's not up yet). Feedback is welcome, and I hope that I'm not speaking too quickly. At any rate, you can always read. A teacher in Phoenix, Arizona gave a photography lesson to his students then decided to use his computer to watch porn. While work and play might go together at times, he made just one mistake. What he forgot to do was turn off the screen projector. As a result, all the students were able to watch exactly what he was enjoying, not so privately, on his own monitor. To worsen matters, when the students tried to get his attention, he hardly perked up. Students said they made loud comments such as, “Wow what is he watching?” but he was too engrossed to notice. Italian comedian Sabina Guzzanti insulted Pope Benedict XVI and is now facing a prison term of up to five years. In her routine, she said that Benedict should go to Hell and be punished by homosexual demons. She is being prosecuted for quote, "offending the ...