Fans grew up with Hennessey's familiar voice through many beloved cartoons

'You got to go to private school'

We still don't trust you *Future voice*

An image shared on Facebook claims to show underneath the Sydney Opera House. Verdict: False The image was generated by artificial intelligence. Fact Check: Social media users are claiming to show the underneath of the Sydney Opera House. This image shows multiple levels of the historic building. This claim is false. Check Your Fact ran the […]

'Judge Haggard declared'

'I am one angry American'

Crafting a list of the 10 Best Songs That Feature the Word ‘Never’ in the Title offers a unique lens through which to explore timeless rock and pop classics, showcasing how a single word can bind together tracks of extraordinary emotional and artistic range. INXS’s “Never Tear Us Apart,” with its sweeping orchestration and Michael Hutchence’s heartfelt vocals, captures the intensity of unbreakable love. Heart’s “Never” channels the fierce resilience of its creators, delivering an anthem of defiance wrapped in polished rock production. Alice Cooper’s confessional ballad “I Never Cry” lays bare his struggles with addiction, transforming pain into a The post 10 Best Songs That Feature The Word ‘Never’ In The Title appeared first on ClassicRockHistory.com.

Books Reading the Weird Never Respond to Rejection Letters: Aimee Picchi’s “The Only Writing Advice You’ll Ever Need to Survive Eldritch Horrors” Time to come clean about your secret, monster-fighting identity. By Ruthanna Emrys, Anne M. Pillsworth | Published on November 20, 2024 Comment 0 Share New Share Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches. This week, we cover Aimee Picchi’s “The Only Writing Advice You’ll Ever Need to Survive Eldritch Horrors,” first published in Lightspeed Magazine in July 2024. Spoilers ahead! Our narrator writes in second person point-of-view, so let’s call her “you” below. Your ex-boyfriend, who hesitates to call himself a writer because Rejections, thinks 2P-POV is “limiting, even off-putting.” Regardless, you write to him in this mode. You’re not trying to be off-putting. It’s just he hasn’t answered your emails or texts, and he’s sent your letter back unopened. Since he constantly reads writing advice articles, you’re composing one intended only for him, to slip under his door. Stupid idea? Maybe, but you’ve just gotten off an exhausting night shift at your real job of combatting eldritch horrors. So… Error #1, demonstrated throughout the article: Second Person POV. Error #2: Starting with your main character waking up. Your ex thinks such openings are “boring and unoriginal.” But the tension in your relationship began with all the mornings he woke up alone. Last Sunday, he texted at 3 a.m. while you were fighting off an “absolute monstrosity,” so the exchange didn’t go well. He didn’t buy it that you were handling a work emergency—what kind of middle-of-the-night emergencies do accountants have? You should have told him you were a cop or crime reporter. It didn’t help that you came home with glop in your hair. He declared he’d had enough of your lies, then broke up with you! Error #3: Listicles. Your ex thinks they’re “cheap tricks” (…not that he won’t sneak-read them). Here are his reasons for breaking up: You’re lying about your work. Your phone has an encrypted message service that pings every time you vanish. Whenever you’re dealing with “accounting emergencies,” people die gruesome deaths. He deserves better. Error #4: Purple prose. Overly ornate descriptions kill narrative flow, your ex contends. You know there are worse things plaguing your “adored conurbation,” which bathes in “crepuscular beauty” even as “rapacious monstrosities” swim up from their “underworld of hunger and horror” to “haul their twisted souls onto the metropolis’ fair streets” and “fill their gullets with the flesh of innocent citizens.” Error #5: Flashback! Ex says no one likes being pulled out of the main storyline for dives into the past, but you can only explain your situation by flashing back. See, you were twelve and on a school trip to the Metropolitan High-Energy Collider when an earthquake caused dark matter to spew out over you and twelve classmates. Later you’d learn a disturbance in the undercity eldritch portal created the quake. Following hospital stays, you and your friends were transferred to a special school that stressed martial arts instruction. The dark matter had left every synapse in your bodies brimming with power. Not quite human anymore, you and the other “Lucky Thirteen” were the only ones who could combat the monstrous invaders. You had to maintain secret identities to safeguard your loved ones. You and the rest of the Thirteen had enough trouble keeping yourselves safe; two decades after the Collider accident, only five of you remain. Error #6: Spare your darlings. You must be merciless, your ex believes, in editing out characters, plotlines, and details that don’t further your story. You, however, wish you could have spared your seven dead colleagues. You wish you could continue to spare your ex from the hideous truth, but you must be candid. It’s your only shot at redemption. You can’t stand to lose anyone else. Error #7: Telling instead of showing: Show story action, don’t tell it, your ex insists. But you have to tell him about your work. To show him up close would endanger him. Knowing about your real job, he may utterly reject you. Still, for him to forgive your lies, the truth must be told. You made mistakes, but with the best intentions. Think about how best intentions can justify even the cardinal writing mistakes above. Look at the great second person stories, stories that meander with beloved characters and purple prose, that pack in listicles, flashbacks and exposition that are perhaps unneeded but so wanted. Sometimes rules are better broken than observed. So you hope your ex will give you another chance. If you survive the coming night of horrors, you’ll tell him about your battles. But you’ll show him that “your character and love run deep.” This week’s metrics: What’s Cyclopean: There’s a whole section on/of purple prose here—the city is an “adored conurbation” of “crepuscular beauty,” under attack by “rapacious monstrosities.” Weirdbuilding: Once an earthquake at a high-energy collider can create superpowers via dark matter, we are definitely in the realm of comic book physics. If you could get clearly detectable dark matter out of a collider in our world, what you’d have would be a Nobel Prize. Ruthanna’s Commentary For many unfortunate weird fiction protagonists, the unimaginable intrudes into ordinary life just once and breaks their comfortable paradigm into smithereens. They are forced to correlate the contents of their mind and, despite all efforts at denial, to admit the reality of things that make humanity seem puny and trivial. They can no longer retreat into the comfort of surface appearances—everything they know has been proved a tissue-thin illusion. Sometimes, though, an author needs an excuse for a series—and at that point, reality-breaking abominations get penciled into your Tuesday schedule after the stand-up meeting and hopefully before lunch. The hazards of the professions may be high, but at some point the capacity for shock dulls. You can get used to anything. Thus Buffy. Thus Blackwood’s John Silence, Shaw’s Devin Stacy, Le Fanu’s Hesselius, and McGuire’s Fighting Pumpkins. As Blackwood’s editor pointed out, a shared character can tie together many disparate stories, while single-story clients can all go as mad with revelation as you please. But then, as Buffy points out, you can’t get through seasons’ worth of that sort of thing without developing more complex trauma than a single episode permits. Nor can you live as a constant protagonist without serious wear and tear on your relationships. Especially if you’re so unfortunate as to have a secret identity. Picchi’s unnamed narrator has that misfortune. Even beyond the secret identity, she was drafted as a hero in childhood, has been losing compatriots steadily, and has a terrible cover story. Accounting? Only in Stross’ Laundry Files universe, where elder god incursions regularly result from mathematical errors, would that be a good match. Our narrator has also clearly heard her ex going on extensively about his work, or she wouldn’t know enough to put together this little listicle. It does make me wonder what the eldritch-battle version of introductory writing advice looks like: Denial is not a river in Egypt; the sooner you acknowledge what’s happening, the sooner you can both fight it and get therapy. Check sources besides the Necronomicon, and make very sure of your translations before invoking anything. Avoid mushrooms. When you’re out of options, never assume that you can’t ram Cthulhu with a boat. It just might work. Et cetera. But this is a story about breaking well-meaning rules, and about the possibility of something working out in spite of obvious mistakes. “Think of all the glorious stories written in second person, novels meandering with beloved darlings and purple prose, stories told via listicles and stuffed with flashbacks and exposition that might not be needed but are still desperately wanted.” Indeed, not everything needs to be, or should be, spare and streamlined, and for some topics that prose style is as bad a match as accounting and superhero schedules. There’s one important fact about writing that the Narrator doesn’t seem to have picked up: Writers are always eager for new material. Her ex might be frustrated with her hidden life, but he may well be utterly delighted with what she’s finally revealed. Every Holmes needs a Watson, after all. And every struggling author needs a Holmes—or a Silence, or a Stacy—to come home from a hard day at the not-office, get their feet rubbed, and provide fodder for the muse. Anne’s Commentary The song “Superman (It’s Not Easy),” written and performed by John Ondrasik (aka Five for Fighting), saw much play after September 11, 2001 as a tribute to the victims of the World Trade Center attack and its first responders. It was also featured in the television series Smallville, which centered on Clark Kent’s teenage trials. So you wanna be a superhero, with powers far beyond those of ordinary human beings? Better listen to this song first, because the superhero gig isn’t all fancy red capes and the adoration of your particular home metropolis. I bet the narrator of Picchi’s “Only Writing Advice” has “Superman” as her cell ringtone. It’s sure not easy being her. For twenty years, she’s accepted her fate-ordained task of defending her city from eldritch monstrosities. In the beginning, she had twelve super-colleagues, the classmates who were exposed to the same collider-failure blast of dark matter as herself. The superkids, giddy over their cool new powers and hero roles, called themselves the Lucky Thirteen. It would probably take quite the flowchart to illustrate the intimate relationships that formed within the group over the years. Given the need to maintain a cover identity, where better to find mates than among your fellow secret soldiers. With them, you didn’t have to maintain the illusion of a “normal” life. You didn’t have to be afraid they’d be unable to understand your situation. You didn’t have to lie. Lies are slow poison to a relationship, their toxicity building with each dose of falsehood. Then may come the Big Exposure, too likely to be the fatal dram. Picchi’s narrator hopes that her ex-lover may be able to understand why she’s been lying once she tells the whole truth and nothing but. She hopes he’ll be able to forgive her. She’s got to hope, doesn’t she? The Lucky Thirteen have dwindled, violently we must fear, to a Not-So-Lucky Five. If four of those supercolleagues have already paired off or proven otherwise ineligible, where’s the narrator to look for love if not among “civilians”? Whatever organization is behind the Five had better start creating more abomination-busters. Was the event that caused the original dark matter burst a singular one, not to be reproduced by mere humans, or even souped-up not-quite-humans? It can’t be that ethical issues are the problem, not when Beasts From Beyond are nightly reducing the citizenry, aka the Tax-Payers. Man, I’m sounding as cynical as our narrator has an arguable right to be. Yet she still has hope. Her character and love must “run deep,” indeed. They are what deepen “Only Writing Advice” from a thoroughly enjoyable mash-up of stock writing How-Tos and stock cosmic horror to a moving testament to resilience which silenced my snorts of mirth. Do I think Mr. Ex is likely to react well to the narrator’s truth-telling? No. The last item in his “listicle” of reasons for initiating a break-up is that he “deserves better” than her. Here’s another writing truism: To be self- and goal-centered with regards to your work-in-progress may be a necessary mindset. For example, living with a beyond-human freak who too often spends the night fighting monsters is bound to distract you and disrupt your writing process. On the other hand, think of the firsthand (or safely secondhand) material you could garner from such a mate. If you’re a weird fic writer, that’s got to offset the annoyance of slime stains in the bathtub and chitinous bits left in the washer and dryer. Also, if this as yet “minor” incursion from the depths becomes a full-scale apocalypse, who better to have at your side than a certified Abomination-Buster? Something to think about, Mr. Ex. Next week we’re taking a break for American Thanksgiving. We return on December 4th for Chapters 40-42 of Pet Sematary, where everyone acts sensibly and follows advice. I mean, I’m assuming? The alternative is too terrible to contemplate.[end-mark] The post Never Respond to Rejection Letters: Aimee Picchi’s “The Only Writing Advice You’ll Ever Need to Survive Eldritch Horrors” appeared first on Reactor.

Big hair, fresh faces, and a whole lot of bangs, the 80s were quite a time for women, especially the era's sitcom actresses. From the young girls in The Wonder Years and Punky Brewster to the ladies of Three's Company and Kate & Allie, 80s sitcom actresses were once the talk of the household. So, it begs the question, where are some of the sitcom favorites today? While some stayed in the... Source

Editor’s note: A Georgia judge on Wednesday morning found Jose Antonio Ibarra, an illegal alien from Venezuela, guilty on all 10 counts in the murder of nursing student Laken Riley. Ibarra, who faces life in prison, waived his right to a jury trial. The trial of the man accused of brutally murdering 22-year-old Laken Riley serves as a harrowing reminder of the failures of the criminal justice and immigration systems. Those systems, if they operate as they should, protect the most vulnerable among us. Laken should be alive today, but a combination of misguided policies and systemic failures led to this preventable tragedy. Every layer of governance that was supposed to safeguard Laken and countless others failed us, especially our daughters who deserve to feel safe on college campuses. We need to get back to basics and common sense so that this type of nightmare doesn’t happen again. Let’s look at three major problems.  First and foremost, we must address the issue of open borders. The monster charged with Laken’s murder, Jose Antonio Ibarra, 26, should never have been granted entry into this country in the first place. Ibarra, an illegal alien from Venezuela, shouldn’t have been released by authorities after he committed crimes before Laken’s murder. Who in their right mind thought that was a good idea? Second, we need to acknowledge and admit that the Left’s version of “bail reform” has been, and continues to be, an abject failure. It has only endangered residents in America’s largest cities. Ibarra had been arrested on two felony charges—one for operating a scooter without a license and the other for endangering the welfare of a minor.  These charges alone should have prompted a more serious scrutiny of the risk he posed to others, notwithstanding the fact that he was in this country illegally. Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz, a Democrat, had the opportunity to hold Ibarra accountable. Yet due to New York’s bail reform laws, Ibarra was issued “desk appearance” tickets, which made it easier for prosecution to be declined.   At the very least, Ibarra should have been prosecuted for operating a scooter without a license, which has been a major quality-of-life issue for Katz’s constituents. It is vital that we demand accountability from our prosecutors, who are elected to uphold the law. When Ibarra received a mere citation for stealing in Athens, which meant there was no one monitoring his compliance with the conditions of his release due to the absence of secured bail. What kind of bail reform is that, when a person such as Ibarra is allowed to roam free and hunt innocent victims? No bail, no bail agent, no accountability. Third, we need to confront the fact that George Soros-financed “progressive” prosecutors have become a cancer on the body politic. The movement, exposed by Heritage Foundation scholars and former prosecutors Cully Stimson and Zack Smith in their must-read book “Rogue Prosecutors,” has been the most dangerous social experiment unleased on society in modern times.  The image of Laken Riley’s mother sitting in court, grappling with the evidence of her daughter’s horrific murder, should stir a deep sense of urgency within all of us. How many more lives must be lost before we take a stand against the policies that put our daughters in jeopardy? That endangers each and every one of us? Knowing the nation’s borders will be secure through the incoming Trump administration, we must consider how to implement safeguards in cities and states that embrace reckless policies driven by the far Left. The solutions are kindergarten simple. The next attorney general of the United States must enforce the country’s criminal laws at the federal level, encourage the 2,300 elected district attorneys to do so at the local level, and put the needs of victims first. Period.  America’s next attorney general must visit the crime-ridden cesspools of New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and other places that have Soros-funded rogue prosecutors and call them out by name. He needs to unleash his U.S. attorneys on those cities, directing them to prosecute every single felon in possession of a firearm and to work closely with immigration authorities to ensure that convicted criminal aliens are deported promptly from our country.  He needs to stand by victims and victims’ rights organizations and never waiver.      We need leaders who are willing to fight for justice and ensure that our legal system serves the interests of the community rather than coddles criminals. In the current landscape of our justice system, an alarming disparity exists between the rights of victims and the rights of criminals. Victims of crime should have an equally robust mechanism to voice their grievances and seek justice when they feel wronged by the system. Yet, as it stands, such a platform is largely absent, leaving individuals and families to navigate their trauma without the support they deserve. When a district attorney chooses not to prosecute a case, or when a judge releases a dangerous individual who subsequently commits further violence, victims find themselves in a position of vulnerability. They are left to pick up the pieces while the very systems designed to protect them fail. This is a profound injustice that must be addressed. In stark contrast, criminals have the ability to appeal convictions, challenge evidence, and contest the actions of law enforcement and the judiciary. This imbalance raises critical questions: Why do victims lack a similar avenue for redress? Why are their concerns brushed aside, while offenders get multiple opportunities to fight against the consequences of their actions? As we reflect on the tragic case of Laken Riley, let us not forget that the fight for accountability and reform is also about the safety and well-being of the broader community. We must advocate policies that prioritize public safety, hold perpetrators accountable, and ensure that our legal system is equipped to protect those who are most vulnerable. The time for change is now, and it’s our collective responsibility to ensure that tragedies such as Laken’s never happen again. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post The Tragic Case of Laken Riley: A Call for Accountability and Reform appeared first on The Daily Signal.