The Tale of Two Mothers

HILLTOP MANSION

What is a chateausque-styled mansion built between 1889 and 1895, nestled on 175,000 square feet, 8,000 acres estate in the mountains of Asheville, North Carolina, and featuring 250 rooms and considered the largest privately - home in the United States? It is none other than George Washington Vanderbilt's home, the Biltmore. The Biltmore Estate is worth unimaginably between $1.2 and $1.35 billion dollars. This includes the value of the mansion, which is worth between $200 and $350 million dollars, and the 125,000 acres of land that comprise the rest of the estate, which are worth around $1 billion dollars. The current global economic crisis is one that has provided common people with a glimpse into the world of finance and economics, especially with the fact that the value of homes and properties is somehow tied into the dynamics of the economy of a nation. One lesson that many of us have learned from the current economic crisis is that somehow the value of real estat...

SUDDENLY

Frank Sinatra is more remembered by many for his silky, love ballads than for his many movie roles. Yes! In his lifetime, Mr. Sinatra appeared in not less than fifty – six (56) films, including his number one, “ From Here to Eternity ” (1953], with Burt Lancaster and Donna Reed. And I really doubt if many people still remember or have ever even seen Frank Sinatra in “ Suddenly ” (1954), in which he plays the role of John Baron, a psychopathic assassin. Don’t feel bad if you have never seen “ Suddenly ”, it happens to be just one of those forgotten Sinatra classics that now runs once or maybe twice a year on The TCM (Turner Classic Movies) Channel. In “ Suddenly ”, John Baron (Sinatra) leads a team of hired assassins to Suddenly, a sleepy little town in California, on a mission to assassinate the President of the United States, as the President’s campaign train makes a brief stop at the town’s train station. As the camera rolls in on the opening shot, Sheriff Tod...

THE MIRROR OF TRUE TRANSFORMATION

We are used to looking at life l as if we are looking in the mirror. What we often see in the mirror is not reality but rather a reflection of it. The mirror does not reflect the true self, but only reflects what it sees. And when you do not like what you see then you begin to distort your reflected self. Then the reflection gradually becomes a distortion of your true self. The above phenomenon is known as self-delusion. Self-delusion does not bring true transformation. It actually takes you farther away from it. It is hard to achieve true transformation if you are living in the state of self-delusion. It should become clearer why the makeup and cosmetic surgery industry is a multi billion dollar industry and still climbing. You do not have to look at it too hard to notice that many of our popularized celebrity cosmetic transformations still have situations in their lives that leave them untransformed....

INSPIRATIONAL FILES

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