ShaneWilson.net

Battle Royale

I just watched the Japanese horror movie, Battle Royale for the second time. This is one of my favorite movies.

The film is set in Japan in the near future. Teenage crime has become out of contol, and to deal with this the government implements the Battle Royale Act.

A class of 42 Junior High School students are taken to a deserted island and given 3 days to kill each other off. At the end of the three days, if more than one person is still alive, everyone dies.

The students deal with the situation in differnet ways. Some commit suicide, some band together, and some take pleasure in the killing.

Kill Bill

I went to see Kill Bill. Wow, what an amazing movie. Quentin Tarintino is a god! This was definately one of the most violent movies I've seen - blood and severed limbs everywhere! The fight scenes were amazing. And much of the dialogue was hilarious. And of course Uma Thruman looked hot.

ripped off

Damn, just got ripped off by a drug dealer. If you cant' trust your drug dealer, who can you trust?

Lil

While I was a the John de Ruiter meeting on Saturday night, I thought I saw a woman I was friends with about 12 years ago. Her name was Lil. We were classmates in college and worked on a lot of projects together. We were taking Audiovisual Communications at Grant MacEwan Community College. Unfortunately our friendship ended badly.

Actually, the only reason I even noticed the woman at the meeting is because she seemed to be staring at me. Now, I'm not a particularly good looking guy, so I don't think that's why she was looking at me. She definately looked like Lil. But it has been 12 years, so it was hard to be sure. She was sitting close to the entrance to the room, and I was at the other end of the room. I was hoping to get closer and maybe even approach her on the way out, but she was out the door before I got a chance.

Like I said already, Lil and I were college classmates and friends. It was a bit of an unusual friendship. I am and have always been a very shy, quiet person. Lil was extremely outgoing, and always the life of the party. She was also several years older than me (I was 18 when we met). We did have a few things in common, but I think what drew us together was that we were both very unhappy people at the time and we gave each other a shoulder to cry on. Probably not the best thing to build a friendship on. I went through a period of pretty bad depression during that time. I would probably would have committed suicide had it not been for Lil. I haven't thought about her much over the years, though she's crossed my mind occassionaly over the couple years, because of a girl I worked with at my last job (at Money Mart) who reminds me a lot of her.

I really don't know what would happen if Lil and I did run into each other now. I would hope after all this time she wouldn't still be mad at me. I don't expect that we could ever be friends again, but perhaps we could make peace. It will probably never happen, but who knows.

Messiah or Cult leader?

I walked past the place at 6:00 PM, one hour before the meeting was scheduled to begin. there were already 20-30 people lined up at the door in hopes for a seat close to their Guru. Not wanting to wait in line for an hour with strangers who were quite possibly really wierd, I headed to the Tim Hortons accross the street for a dunut and hot chocolate. At 6:30 I headed back across the street. The lineup was significantly longer - I'd guess around a hundered people. I got in line within ten minutes there were 30 more behind me.

Then they let us inside. There was a notice on the door advising all who entered that any recording or photogrophy was strictly prohibited. The notice also advised that the press was not welcome.

We all had to remove our footware inside. Next stop was the wating room. There were letters of the alphabet posted on the wall. We were to sit or stand in the area indicated by the first letter of our first name. However since it was my first time there I got to to near the beginning of the line. I paid my $5.00 and found a seat.

The stage contained a chair, a table, and a couple plants. There were two video cameras protruding down from the ceiling, A woman came out and placed a vase of flowers and a glass of water on the table. A man then came out and reminded us that photography or recording of any kind is strictly probited. At least two hundred people were seated by now.

Then he came out , sat in the chair and put on a microphone. Then, for several minutes he gazed at the audience without saying a word.

He is John de Ruiter , a local new age Guru who attracts followers from around the world. When he is not travelling, he holds meetings here in Edmonton several times a week. Hundreds show up.

The format for the meeting is that audience members sign up for the chance to sit in the questoner's chair and ask John questions.

The first person up was a man who had been coming to these meetings for five years. He says over the past five years he has not become a better person, in fact he as become worse, and he can't understand why. He says he is very abusive to others, particularly women.

After listening to the man, John started at him in silence for about 5 minutes before responding. He gave the men some common sence advice about taking responsibility for his behavior. And talked a lot about knowing , truth, and love, with several long pauses while he again gazed hypnotically at the audience.

Over three hours, several others got to ask John quesiotns about their problems. He always responded with vague but common sense answers intertwined with long pauses. And lots of talk of knowlege, truth, and love.

Overall, I found the meeting to be quite boring. None of the audience members actually asked him anything interesting. And John basically just repeated the same vague things in slightly different wording as his responses to all the questions. His gazing was quite hypnotic though.

For about the last 15 minutes of the meeting, John simply gazed out at the audience in silence, making eye contact with as many people as possible. He made I contact with me and I looked away. A minute or two later he looked at me again, I think because I had looked away the first time. This time I met his gaze and stared back at him. I continued to look into his eyes for the rest of the meeting, and I do think I was beginning to become hypnotized. My vision got fuzzy and everything got really bright. There seemed to be a bright light around not just John, but around each object I coud see in my peripheral vision, for example the plants that were on the stage. I imagine this must be similar to what is commonly experienced on Scientology's TR's. I recongnize this as a purely psycological effect, and nothing spiritual.

I think all of this may be relatively harmless to the casual follower, but many of the people there (particularly those who took the quistioner's microphone) seemed to be mentally and or emotionally unstable and seemed to be totally obsessed and in love with John. I think these people could be further damaged by this. While I can fault in nothing he said, his advise his vague and undersimplified, and he is definately not a qualified mental health practitioner.

Anyway, I don't think I'll be back, but it was an interesting experience.