Tag Archives: Soul Of The Beast

SOB British Prisoners

Were Starving Irishmen Convicted For Stealing Food?

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SOB Map Australia

 Soul of the Beast takes place in 1886 during the time of the British Empire. At the time, many Irishmen  were convicted of the same felony. Their crime? Stealing food to feed their starving families. For punishment, they were sent to the penal colony in Australia. Below are excerpts from an online article  on the subject by Independent Australia. You can read the article by clicking on the link.

In the early [1800's], …Australia became the first [British] colony to build a society [based] on the labour of convicted felons…Between 1787 and 1852, more than 150,000 convicts were transported to eastern Australia … around 50,000 prisoners being of Irish origin… SOB convicts on Shipminor thefts [like stealing food to survive were the predominant reasons for the Irish convictions]… Continue reading →

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HOW BIG CAN DIAMONDS GET?

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cullinan-diamond-worlds-largest

A gigantic diamond plays an important part in Soul Of The Beast and Awakening Of The Beast. How big can real diamonds get? No one knows for certain.The biggest real diamond ever found was the Cullinan diamond. It has 3106 carats and weighs 1.33 pounds (or 621.35 grams).

In the Soul Of The Beast, the fictional diamond is the same size and weight as a bull. The average weight of a  Angus bull is 2500 pounds or 1,825 times larger than the largest known diamond. The Soul Of The Beast diamond is  impossibly large which means it  may not be a diamond at all.  If that’s true, then  what is it?  The answer is in Awakening Of The Beast, the second book in the BEAST series.  

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Any comments about diamonds?  You can post them below. I’d like to hear from you! 

SOBSleepless

How Long Can We Survive Without Sleep?

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The main characters in Soul Of The Beast  and Awakening Of The Beast, are forced to go without sleep for days.   Below are excerpts from the website SLEEPIO: 

[How long can we survive without sleep? We don't actually know. What we do know is sleep, like breathing] is a fundamental human requirement. It has even been said that one could survive for three times as long without food as one could without sleep. [One animal experiment] found that depriving rats entirely of sleep resulted in their death, or near-dying state, within 11-32 days…

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ATB Prophet2

What Is A Prophet?

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prophet-jeremiah3A prophet plays an important part in Awakening Of  The Beast, second book in the Beast Series. According to the online dictionary, Merriam-Webster, a prophet is:

…”a member of some religions (such as Christianity, Judaism, and Islam) who delivers messages that are believed to have come from God.”

[The messages spoken by prophets are frequently the repeating of the messages and prophesies ... already given by God through other prophets. Their words can also be new messages and prophesies from God.  There are multiple prophets in the Bible such as Moses, Jeremiah, Isaiah, John, Elijah, Elisha and Daniel. Islam is based on the prophesies and teachings of the prophet Muhammad.]

What Does A Prophet Talk About? Continue reading →

SOBTethysOcean

THE ANCIENT OCEAN

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In SOUL OF THE BEAST, there is an ancient map that shows an ocean separating India from the Asian continent.The map is fiction, but the ocean was real and is called the Tethys Ocean.

The ancient ocean existed until the land mass of India shifted north and collided with Asia. When India and Asia came together, that eliminated the ocean and forced the land up. This elevation of the land is known today as the Himalayan Mountains. The movement of continents is called continental drift or tectonic shift and is still happening today.

Tectonic drift didn’t just happen between Asia and India. If you look at a map of the world, you’ll see that the continents of Europe, Africa, North America and South America  fit together like large pieces of a puzzle. That is because they were once part of a single and much larger land mass called Pangaea. (See the map above.) Unlike the collision of the Asia and India continents eliminating an ocean, here  the movement of tectonic plates created large bodies of water and  split the “super continent” into smaller continents.

SOB Himalayas6

You can enter your comments and insights below. I’d like to hear from you.

 

everest1

Is Climbing Mount Everest Dangerous?

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Himalayan Climb

Climbing Mount Everest is extremely dangerous. Jon Krakauer wrote “Into Thin Air”, a true life account of his disastrous climb to the top of Mt. Everest. What he experienced was beyond dangerous. Below are exerpts from his book that speak for themselves.

…a boulder the size of a small television came rocketing down from the cliffs above and smashed Andy Harris’s chest. It knocked him off his feet, slammed the wind out of him, and left him dangling from the fixed lie in a  state of shock for several minutes. Had he not been clipped in with a jumar he would have certainly fallen to his death.

Chen Yu-Nan…crawled out of his tent to evacuate his bowels shod only in smooth-soled liners of his mountaineering boots- a serious lapse of judgment. As he squatted, he lost his footing on the ice and went hurtling down the Lhotse Face. Incredibly, after falling only 70 feet he plunged headfirst in a crevasse, which arrested his tumble. Sherpas who had seen the incident lowered a rope, quickly pulled him out of the slot…(the) radio crackled to life: it was Jangbu reporting in a panicked voice that Chen had stopped breathing.everest8 Continue reading →

SOBearths-moon

HOW OLD IS IT REALLY?

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The age of old things is  most often taught as fact. What teachers and scientists don’t tell us (and often don’t know) is the techniques used to determine the age of old things are often based on assumptions [educated guesses] and can be wrong. Below are some examples of how old things are dated and how the dating can be wrong.

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SOBDisappear

Can Monks Really Disappear?

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tibetan-monk1No one can actually disappear. When a monk in Soul Of The Beast disappears, he is blocking people from seeing him through mind control. Could mind control be used in the real world to make someone seem to disappear? To my knowledge, this has not been confirmed, but it should be possible.

To a minor degree, mind control is already part of our everyday lives. It is so common that we don’t see it for what it is and accept it as normal. Our minds are controlled with advertising, propaganda, movies, television, radio, stirring speeches, bad news, good news, what we’re taught in school, and even gossip from a neighbor.

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SOBfuneral-pyre

How Different Cultures Deal With Their Dead

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In Soul Of The Beast and Awakening Of The Beast, the bodies of the dead are cremated.  Cremation is the burning of a dead body until all that is left are ashes. This method of disposing of the dead is  used in many parts of the world, including the United States. Other common ways  in the US for dealing with the dead are burial in the ground and placing the body inside a stone structure (mausoleum, tomb, pyramid, temple). SOBnewgrang

Other practices for dealing with the dead that are less familiar or unknown in the United States and  Western cultures include:

Leaving the dead body on the ground for animals to eat.

Building a mound of earth or a pile of stones over the body.

SOB mummyMummification (preservation of the body to stop rotting) .

Sending the body out to sea on a burning ship (vikings).

Placement of the body inside a sealed cave to rot. After decomposition of the body is complete, all that remains are the bones. The bones are removed from the cave and stored separately or placed with other bones in an “ossuary”.  Wikipedia definition of ossuary is: a chest, building, well, or site made to serve as the final resting place of human skeletal remains.

Below are excerpts about additional  ways cultures deal with their dead. This information comes from the online website matadornetwork. Continue reading →

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BEGGARS

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BEGGARS

In Soul of the Beast, John encounters beggars in Calcutta, India. Below is a discussion about beggars with quotes from Wikipedia .

SOBbeggar_4Beggars and Begging “have existed in human society since before the dawn of recorded history.” Begging is still common in nearly every society today with a variation in  the prevalence and exact form.

 Beggars are typically people who are unable to work because of personal problems such as handicaps, injuries and mental illness or because of a lack of jobs. They beg to obtain the basics of life: food and money. 

In the past,  governments helped beggars by forcing them into workhouses, “a state-operated institution where those unable to obtain other employment were forced to work in often grim conditions in exchange for a small amount of food. The welfare state of the 20th century [has] greatly reduced the number of beggars by directly providing for the basic necessities of the poor from state funds.”

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