Today’s wacky Russian horoscope for Taurus: There are a lot of indispensable people. And there it is much less irreplaceable things. That fact can appear very useful today. Remember also that it is better to see once than to hear a hundred times.

So I did a mind map last night.

This is an enjoyable thing because I have a stationery fetish. Mmm, paper. Pens in many colors. Colored pencils! I mapped out this book I’m trying to get going on rewriting, and I feel it did move me along, seeing it all mapped out on a single sheet of paper.

The Mind Mapping Movement, although they do not call themselves that I don’t think, strikes me as a case of a good idea rendered less attractive by being embedded in a shell of dogma. When I was a youth, I tried out Transcendental Meditation. It was fun and harmless, the basic idea, calming down by meditating twice a day for 15 minutes each. A calm mind would work better, one would think. Good idea. Then I started getting pamphlets in the mail calling M*harishi M*hesh Y*gi “His Holiness”, with pictures of adepts levitating via expert meditation, and it made me lose interest.

Positive point: no levitation or holiness in mind mapping yet. Negative point: list of super minds at the end of the book includes wacko chess player Bobby Fischer, dead Carl Sagan and also dead Gene Roddenberry. So use mind-mapping carefully, too much apparently kills, or renders you a crackpot.