Recently, I was tagged on Face­book by a few friends on this new topic, “25 ran­dom things about me.” The rules on Face­book are dif­fer­ent. I’ve changed the rules slightly for the blogosphere…

Here are the rules.

Once you’ve been tagged, you are sup­posed to write a post with 25 ran­dom things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose five more peo­ple to be tagged. You also have to tag the per­son who tagged you. If I tagged you, it’s because I want to know more about you. To do this, you sim­ply link to their blogs so that they know you responded to their tag.

(You may include the above rules in your post so that the per­son being tagged knows them, too. You may also want to tweet your post to notify them on Twit­ter, too.)

Let’s start with things you may already know…

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I’m in Vegas right now attend­ing three sem­i­nars back to back. I’ve been here for close to three weeks now, and we’re about to return home tomor­row. This explains why I haven’t blogged in a while.

While here, we’re look­ing at some prop­er­ties. We want to buy a vaca­tion home, espe­cially dur­ing those cold win­ter months in Canada. (I think we found our home.)

But last week, my wife took me to see George Car­lin at the Orleans Casino as my Father’s Day gift. It was a great show. George was fun­nier than ever. Still raw, caus­tic, and rant­ing at 71, he cer­tainly hasn’t lost his touch.

Well, just a few moments ago I’ve learned that we, how­ever, lost him.

When I learned about it, I was speech­less. We just saw him a few days ago! I guess we caught one of his last shows if not his last. The fun­ni­est part of this? His show included jokes about dying and the afterlife.

Rest in peace, George Car­lin. We’ll miss you.

A fair warn­ing: this post delves into some­thing I’m pas­sion­ate about, which is some­what philo­soph­i­cal in nature. So if you’re of a cer­tain reli­gious per­sua­sion and eas­ily offended by oth­ers, then please skip over this blog post. If not, read on…

“The Secret” is tak­ing the entire world by storm. It deals with the “Law of Attrac­tion,” in that we attract to our­selves what we think and feel, and that our per­cep­tions mold our reality.

As Earl Nightin­gale pro­claimed in “The Strangest Secret,” one of the first self-​​help pro­grams I’ve ever bought: “We become what we think about.”

You may have seen it talked about on Larry King, Oprah, and many other talk shows. It’s the most suc­cess­ful Inter­net launch of any prod­uct. It hit Alexa #1 soon after its launch, and pro­pelled to the Amazon.com’s #1 best sell­ing book and DVD within a few months.

It appeared in The Wall Street Jour­nal, New York Times, and Time Mag­a­zine, and even on the cover of Newsweek, which came shortly thereafter.

But is “The Secret” truly worth the buzz? Or is it just an old-​​world phi­los­o­phy pack­aged in some new­fan­gled mar­ket­ing? The answer to the for­mer is def­i­nitely “yes.” But for the lat­ter, it’s “yes” and “no.” Let me explain…

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