Change your mindset!!  The universe is listening. 

Last year, former New York Post reporter Leonardo Blair was stopped, frisked and later jailed by New York City police after being accused of trying to steal his own car. Blair sued the department for racial profiling and later won a settlement. Now a strikingly similar incident has occurred involving Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who was recently mistaken for a burglar at his own home.

Gates, a prominent Harvard scholar of African-American history, was arrested last week at his Cambridge, Mass., home after police were called about a possible break-in.   Now, local officials said the charges would not be pursued, but the whole episode is unsettling for someonewho has written several books on the black experience in America. They include Colored People: A Memoir and In Search of Our Roots: How 19 Extraordinary African Americans Reclaimed Their Past. He also wrote The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism.

Gates was arrested on a charge of disorderly conduct after a confrontation with an officer at his home, according to news reports. Charles Ogletree, a Harvard Law professor who is Gates' lawyer in the case, told CNN today that Gates had returned from China on Thursday to his home and discovered his front door jammed. He opened his back door with his key and tried unsuccessfully from inside his home to open the front door.

That's when a police officer appeared and asked Gates for identification. Gates apparently became annoyed at being questioned about his own home, and it all spiraled out of control from there.

Good news for eBook lovers.  Barnes & Noble announced the launch "the world's largest eBookstore."   The online bookstore boasts 700,000 titles counts about half a million books in the public domain that are available for free download via a partnership with Google.  

Barnes & Noble described an "every-device strategy" in which electronic books purchased from its online store can be read on many devices, the company made no mention of the Kindle in its press release. Instead, it mentioned iPhones, Blackberries and computers.

The book retailer, which operates 777 stores nationwide, also announced a partnership with Plastic Logic, a company that is developing an eBook device that would compete with the Kindle. The Plastic Logic reader, expected to be the length and width of a sheet of notebook paper, would have wireless download capabilities similar to the Kindle and be on the market in early 2010.

So if you love eBooks give Barnes and Noble’s online bookstore a try.  Now Amazon there's a new kid on the playground.  So play nice!

I saw a 60 Minutes piece on Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique in June.  An American entrepreneur and Harvard graduate, Greg Carr is put 40 million into the park over the next 20 years. to promote tourist and help the Mozambique economy.

It use to be the place where royalty and celebrities when on safaris in the 1960s but past civil wars, HIV and malaria epidemics have hurt the park and Carr is hoping to restore it.  Enjoy!

Okay, we’re all interested in stories about our favorite novelist, right?  Well I came across an article of surprising bestselling author stories complied by Ethan Tex of Mental_Floss.  (See article at http://tinyurl.com/ml8vda)  If you think your favorite writer always had a great voice or knew instinctively how to plot out their stories, you are very mistaken.  Some authors had very interesting professions that added layers to their writing. 

Don’t doubt the steps you are taking to become a writer; you never know how inspiring your journey will be for one of your fans or one of your contemporaries.

Happy writing and reading.

Whitney Houston has a new inspirational ballad, "I Didn't Know My Own Strength," in which first-verse downers such as "lost touch with my soul," "lost sight of my dream," and "I had no hope to hold onto".  It was written my one of our musical, songwriting geniuses, Diane Warren. 

Yes, folks, our troubled diva survived her darkest years, held her head up high, and even found the light to light her way out of the dark.  There's something undeniably appealing about hearing Houston's voice with Warren’s lyrics.  This performance somehow feels more restrained, more intimate, and more heartfelt.

What do you think of "I Didn't Know My Own Strength"? Are you loving it, or is it just too 1990s? And what do you make of its chart prospects in a "Boom Boom Pow" world created by the now generation?

The highly anticipated return of Whitney Houston is scheduled for early September, with her seventh studio album 'I Look To You'.  (See http://www.whitneyhouston.com/ for more details.)