11/28/25
Hard to believe it's been 10 days since I've written an entry. I've been keeping up with the recent Sumo wrestling tournament in Japan, called the "Kyushu Basho." I used to watch highlights back in the early 1990's, when I recorded and played on the air a program called "Today's Japan" for a small PBS station.

I think I learned something which is difficult to put into words. No matter how strong and how skilled a sumo wrestler is, if he wants to prevail, he has to be stronger and more skilled than his opponent. He also has to persevere more fiercely than his opponent. If he does so even a fraction less, he loses.

I am becoming aware of just how powerful the studied incredulity--the sheer irrational stubbornness--is of my critics and (mostly silent) detractors, especially in Academia. I had been gauging it, say, like a high stone wall--but it is more like a mountain.

That means I have to be a force capable of moving mountains. I, or I plus the unseen forces behind me, like Abby and her astral team, the members of which she tells me are "crackerjacks." But where I'm concerned, I have to be smarter, stronger, and more stubborn than my opponents are--and that's mountain-sized, not stone wall sized.

So when the going gets tough, the tough get going. For promotions, I am taking ChatGPT-5.1 as my adviser. It amplifies my admittedly scattered knowledge of this area by 10x or more.

I just got in my first hardcover copy of my book, "The Sacred Carol: Rediscovering the True Authorship of a Christmas Classic." It's beautiful. Absolutely perfect. Stunning.

I've ordered another 20, which will come in late for the Christmas season. I'm using the 20 softcover editions which will be arriving within a week, for the Season work--offering to bookstores on consignment, lectures, etc. The hardcover editions will be sent to libraries.

And, I've got the talk down, now, as well as all the gear I need, even if the venue doesn't have anything to work with. I won't start asking until I have the softcover books in-hand.

In the meantime, I'm creating YouTube video "Shorts"--vertical one-minute pieces. I'm posting one per day. This morning's video, the third in the series, which I posted around 3:00 a.m., has had 118 hits as of 4:19 p.m. Let me check--no, it's gone up to 121 since I checked it about half an hour ago. I've seen this before, but the trick is for it to continue growing exponentially, instead of grinding to a halt. This, ChatGPT-5.1 advises me, is far more likely to happen with the algorithm driving the "Shorts" than with a regular video. Success breeds success, and if you show a certain degree of performance, your video gets boosted, and it snowballs.

I'm going to make at least a week's worth of these on various pithy sub-topics. I'm revealing the smoking guns and fascinating "bits" I've put into the book. I asked the bot whether I should save them for the book, or reveal them in these Shorts, and it said definitely I should reveal them. I suppose if I don't, people will never believe me that they are in there, will never buy the book, and hence will never see them. My usual experience. I have the goods, but since nobody will look at them, they effectively don't exist.

This time, they will exist. If they want the whole story, they can buy the book. If they don't, they've seen the evidence. Having seen the evidence, they know I'm not blowing smoke. If they still choose to pretend I'm stupid, or unimportant, or crazy, or whatever floats their boat, they know they're lying to themselves.

It means I've prevailed, whether they will admit it to themselves, or not. This is the chief difference between Sumo, and what I'm doing. In Sumo, they don't have two guys charging each other and then deciding who won, by themselves. If they did that, one guy could always get stubborn and refuse to admit defeat. They have a judge, an official who pronounces the winner.

If I had that--meaning, a truly objective judge--it would be a different story around here.

Sincerely,

Stephen Sakellarios, M.S.