The Four Footed Angel

A friend of mine and her partner were at his family holiday home in
Wyong Australia. It's in a residential area but across the street from a nature reserve. They took the English Staffordshire Terrier they were dog sitting with them.

The boyfriend took the dog for a walk in the afternoon. The path they were on had broken glass on it. Normally he would guide the dog around the glass but this time he lifted him up to protect his paws. He'd never done this before because the dog is so heavy. When they got home the boyfriend wanted to take a nap in the double bed, but he chose to sleep on the lounge room floor because he had some dog fur on his T-Shirt and didn't want it or the doggy smells in his bed.

My friend also wanted to take a nap that afternoon, but the dog began growling & howling when she approached the bedroom door, so she turned back and sat down to comfort him and pat him and ended up falling asleep next to him on the lounge.

About 6:30 that evening my friend got ready to pack to return to Sydney. She pulled back the bed cover on the bed  to tidy it up with her right hand. She was wearing a cotton glove because she had recently had a flare up of dermatitis . She grabbed what appeared to be a bit of black fluff. When she tried to get rid of the fluff it suddenly had legs. As it unfurled she could see it was actually a spider! She screamed loudly and shook it off her glove and it dropped to the floor.  Her boyfriend freaked because he recognized what it was- a male funnel-web spider!



These are one  of the three deadliest kinds of spiders in the world. They give you a nasty bite which releases toxins into the bloodstream that cause tingling around the mouth and tongue, twitching facial muscles, nausea, vomiting, sweating, salivation, and shortness of breath which leads to agitation, confusion and coma if not treated with antivenom. These spiders usually sleep during the day and she discovered the spider when it was still light out so he was probably in the bed in the afternoon, just when they had planned to take their naps. If it wasn't for the dog, they probably would have gotten bitten. The funny thing is, the dog minding just came up at the last minute.

As my friend says:

I think last Sunday the events leading up to finding the spider all seemed to definitely work together - the last minute dog sit ( we had planned to go up together without any dogs), even me having dermatitis! (obviously the spider still thought it was in the sheets or something as the glove is so soft so didn't attack me!) to the broken bottle on the footpath which made my boyfriend pick up the dog who is so heavy and it was such a hot day! You cant say its all coincidence. It just proves to me that something / an all knowing being is definitely watching us and is able to manipulate us when he feels like it! We tend to call it God!
.........................................................

The picture was taken from this website: http://www.thakurgaon.com/images/sydney_funnel_web_spider.jpg

People Are Weird

A woman once told me about something that happened to her when she was 10 years old.

It was school holidays and her family had booked a flight to go from her home town of Amsterdam to New York. She was so excited about going. Unfortunately, two days before departure her mother developed a severe ear infection, meaning she couldn't fly. As a result, they cancelled their trip. Magda was very angry at her parents for this.

On the day they were supposed to fly, the plane that they were supposed to be on crashed leaving no survivors. You'd think that the woman would have been grateful, after all, her mother's ear infection had saved her life, but to this day she is angry at her mother for having ruined her holiday.

Weird, eh?

Unlikely Allies: Your Scammer and Your Friends

If your friends found out you were being taken in by an internet scammer, and they had a way to prove it, would they tell you? You'd probably say "Of course!"

Unfortunately that's not how people work. For instance I know of a case where a woman is totally obsessed with this guy she met on an internet dating site. He's saying he's going to prove how much he trusts her by sending her thousands of dollars, which she should then send back, just to prove than he can trust her too. This is a Romance Scam combined with a Fake Cheque Scam. Obvious to anyone, except the victim of course, who has never heard of either. Her friend is suspicious and told her not to have any financial dealings with this guy, and she promised she wouldn't, but of course if she doesn't the romance is over so she'll probably end up doing it anyway.

The woman's friend doesn't want to take the next step which is to prove that he IS a scammer. She can do this two ways- she can get the guy's photo forwarded to her and check it against known scammers on this site, or get his e-mail address and check it against known scammers on this site. But she doesn't want to do this because she herself doesn't want it to be true. She doesn't even want to warn her friend because her friend will hate her for it. After all, people who are in love don't want to hear anything bad about their lover right? And even if the woman believes her, well it's going break her heart.

So the easy way out is to just leave the poor woman in her deluded state, wait until she's been taken and listen sympathetically to her while she suffers the heartbreak that was always going to happen, and the humiliation of having been cheated out of money that she couldn't afford to lose. The woman will think her friend is a wonderful person for being so supportive. So that's the option her friend is probably going to take. That's human nature.

Worst thing is, the woman met this guy through a Christian dating site. When her friend warned her not to give the guy money she replied that she was sure God would look out for her. God did. He sent her someone who could prove to her she was being scammed. If her friend doesn't do it however then the woman will believe God let her down. Which He didn't. I'm trying to convince her friend to tell her (I don't even know her name), but if I push too hard, I will lose a friend too. And so it goes. So the strongest allies to a scammer turn out to be the victim's best friends, who won't tell even if they know about it.

Lovely isn't it?
.......................................

 http://www.romancescam.com/album/ has some of the most common photos used, http://www.romancescam.com/ has more ways you can tell if you are dealing with a scammer.
A high percentage of the listings on dating sites are put there by scammers, so look out!

Research Diary 3: What Made Moses Glow?

Not much luck today. Cronus looks like the Seraphs mentioned in Ezekiel but he's associated with the Greeks, not the Assyrians who were causing trouble in that particular time. Interestingly he was closely associated with El, so much so that I often find the hyphenated name El/Cronus when doing my research. El is of course one of the names of the God of Israel, but he was also the god of the Phonecians. If this is a reference to that it is interesting, because under the Phonecian beliefs, YHWH is a son of El, yet here he is being worshipped by El. Weird.

As for the volcanoes. I'm looking for one that is near a desert. Trying to narrow it down a bit I re-read the passage and found the passage where Moses face is glowing after he came down. Made me think of uranium and radioactivity so I checked that out, and checked out if there could be phosphor in the area too. Turns out there is both, so I have to look into that some more.

Eventually I'm going to check where others think Mt Sinai was, but for now I'm trying to get it from scratch.

Also found out there was a Roman volcano god Vulcan. The mythology doesn't at all match YHWH and the dates are wrong, so that's a dead end. Maybe tomorrow I'll have better luck.

Research Diary 2- Olympus, Atlantis and Garden of Eden

Been looking at articles about volcanoes in the middle East. Came across one site that said
there was a volcano in the Garden of Eden:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_of_Eden

Another that said that Mount Olympus was a volcano in Māzandarān

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Damavand

Yet another said that Atlantis could have been a real place sunk by the force of a Volcano 70 miles from Crete that was 120 times more powerful than Mount St Helens.

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/columnist/vergano/2006-08-27-ancient-volcano_x.htm

Also found 55 or so volcanoes in the Middle East region- now I have to go find out more about volcanoes because what I'm looking for is a volcano that hadn't necessarily erupted- just one that was smouldering and shooting the occasional boulder of hot lava out.Apparently the region's volcanoes are mild and don't tend to explode with much force.

Meant to research more today but my friend's friend has been caught up in a romance scam which we were trying to investigate.

Hint- If someone wants to send you money from South Africa and then wants you to send it back, THAT is a scam. Check their photo at this site:

http://www.romancescam.com/forum/portal.php

I can't believe how cruel people can be- taking their money, well, that's one thing. but breaking their hearts as well? The woman refuses to believe she is being taken in. Let's hope this site will convince her.

Research Diary 1

I've decided to try something new on my blog- a research diary. Usually I don't publish until I've done a whole pile of research but the process itself is interesting too- it's like you are a detective trying to find out the truth by following the clues. There are lots of dead ends and quirky discoveries which I think would make interesting reading.

Anyway,the topic I am now investigating is where Mount Sinai/Nount Horeb is. This is the place that the Old Testament says Moses went up to get the Ten Commandments. It says that there was smoke and fire at the top. Praying about it, it occurred to me that this sounds like a volcano. I don't even know if there were active volcanoes in the region at the time but I'm going to check it out.

My first guess is that maybe it was near Sodom and Gomorrah- seeing as that was destroyed by fire and brimstone and sulphur but that theory looks unlikely now, as the most likely site for these cities (the Dead Sea) hasn't had any volcanic eruptions in the past 4000 years. Still, no one's certain where they were exactly, so I'm going to chase that up some more as well.

Also, from my previous research on the gods of the ancient world I noticed a distinct similarity between the Titan god Cronus and the seraph angels mentioned in Isaiah. I'm guessing Cronus is the god of some people mentioned there. It's another thing I want to chase up because it should make a quick post that I can publish soon.