'I’d never seen anyone naked before, except myself'

Out of all the articles we’ve put together—covering everything from time to peace, rain to trains—there’s no bigger question than the meaning of life. It’s the one thing everyone, at some point, wrestles with, and naturally, rock and roll’s taken its own shot at it. While thousands of songs dig into this topic, we wanted to carve out a killer mix of tracks that capture a wide range of perspectives, without straying from the heart of rock. From deep reflections to raw truths, these songs bring some serious weight, and we’ve lined up a diverse roster of artists to show The post 10 Best Rock Songs About The Meaning Of Life appeared first on ClassicRockHistory.com.

A 4-year-old has become the first patient known to British medical history to be taken off life-support and proceeded to recover—so much so that he went home with his parents. This story revolves around a sensitive topic about terminally ill patients, decisions around the ends of lives, sometimes young ones, and what roles do parents, […] The post When Boy’s Life Support Was Turned off He Began Improving–and Went Home with Parents appeared first on Good News Network.

Books Reading the Weird The Joy of the Vulture: Stephen King’s Pet Sematary (Part 11) By Ruthanna Emrys, Anne M. Pillsworth | Published on October 2, 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 continue Stephen King’s Pet Sematary with Chapters 33-35. The novel was first published in 1983. Spoilers ahead! Louis and Ellie attend Norma’s funeral. In a sober navy blue dress bought for the occasion, Ellie seems awed to uncharacteristic silence. Only when Louis joins the pallbearers, promising to meet her outside, does a bit of the old Ellie break through. “Don’t drop her,” she whispers. His task done, Louis joins Jud in watching the morticians settle Norma’s coffin in the hearse. He thinks about how for the two younger pallbearers, distant relations, Norma is probably a dim memory of duty visits to the Crandalls. For them, Jud’s branch of the family must be “like an eroded planetoid drifting away from the main mass.” The past. God save the past, he thinks, and shivers. One day, should Ellie and Gage give him descendants, he’ll be equally unfamiliar to them. On the ride home, Ellie finally cries: Why do people have to be dead? Louis admits he doesn’t know. Perhaps to make room for new people like her and Gage. Ellie promptly declares she’s never going to have kids. Louis tries to explain that for old people, death doesn’t look so bad and can bring an end to suffering. By the time they get home, Ellie has stopped crying. When the kids are asleep for the night, Rachel comes to Louis’s study and tells him how Church brought a dead rat into the house while he and Ellie were gone. She had to beat the cat outside with a vacuum attachment, and he growled at her. Does Louis think he might have distemper? No. Louis knows exactly what’s wrong with Church, and his responsibility. He puts aside work to go upstairs with Rachel and “love her the best he could.” * * * The “blue, still, subzero miniseason of February” passes. Ellie celebrates her sixth birthday. Jud’s most agonizing grief passes into mellower phases. Gage gets his first haircut. Louis jokes about his new, darker hair, but mourns in his heart. Spring comes, and stays awhile. * * * Louis will later realize that the last really happy day of his life was March 24, 1984. Terrible things were still seven weeks in the future, but even so, God doles out much more pain than genuine happiness. With Rachel and Ellie gone to the grocery store with Jud, Louis is left to entertain a Gage who’s recently entered his Terrible Twos. All the usual gambits fail to amuse the toddler-tyrant. Then Louis thinks of the Vulture he bought on a whim a few weeks before. He assembles the kite, with its five-foot wingspan and bloodshot eyes, and takes Gage to a neighbor’s field to fly it. In the “bright, unreliable warmth of March straining to be April,” Louis easily coaxes the Vulture aloft. He feels like he did as a child, that he enters into the kite’s high-altitude perspective of the countryside. When he lets Gage hold the kite string, he feels that he enters Gage’s point-of-view: he shrinks “until he was within Gage’s tiny house, looking out of the windows that were his eyes” at a world so much bigger than it is to an adult, so purely delightful. He tells Gage he loves him. And “Gage, who now had less than two months to live, laughed, ‘Kite flyne, Daddy!’” Rachel and Ellie come home and join the fun, but their presence changes things. Louis isn’t sorry to go back inside. Later, he goes to say goodnight to Gage. After he falls asleep, Louis leaves the room, but a backward glance chills him. Through the cracked door of Gage’s closet peer “yellowy-green, disembodied eyes.” He goes to investigate, wildly thinking of dead Zelda with her black tongue. The door opens on—Church, hissing and baring needle-sharp teeth. Its refusal to get out infuriates him, and he pegs Gage’s toy train at the cat. The cat runs off, but Louis is left sweating, as if he saw a snake menacing the boy. And he imagined Zelda, and Oz the Gweat and Tewwible… He latches the closet door, then returns to Gage’s crib and stands there for a long time, watching his son. What’s Cyclopean: The exhilaration of kite flying comes through in how imagines its perspective, the world “cartographers must see in their dreams,” and then Gage’s view of a world “so huge and bright”. Libronomicon: Louis looks up Troutman’s Treatment of Wounds for an article in The Duquesne Medical Digest, his part in a vigorous and vicious debate over dissolving sutures. Gage, meanwhile, scribbles in Where the Wild Things Are. Ruthanna’s Commentary One of the less popular superpowers is death sight. That is, some aura or image floats in your vision over those soon to die. It might even be a precise countdown. There’s nothing you can do to change the fates thus revealed—and worse, you know that. Not only is death inevitable, but at some point a specific death, at a specific time, becomes inevitable. King’s pulling a nasty trick, giving that superpower to the reader. It’s particularly nasty this week. Norma was one thing: sad, but not a true surprise. Her age and health made the inevitability, if not the timing, logical. But Gage? He’s two. He’s just learning to talk in sentences, delighted by kites and rare alone time with Daddy. Mortality, let alone inevitability, should be a long way off. How unfair—how horrifying—that a toddler should be so marked two months in advance. Humans are very bad at living in the moment, when we’re forced to think too hard about the future. Louis can experience his last happy day only because he doesn’t know that it’s his last such day, or why. The reader, though, can only watch with cold dread. There are things man was not meant to know, and for my money your kid’s deathday is much higher on that list than the specifics of Cthulhu’s naptime. Rachel’s parents, of course, experienced something all too close to that, no supernatural vision required. Perhaps that’s why Louis keeps thinking of Zelda, flashing on her Oz poster or imagining her haunting Gage’s closet in place of Church. Cat and sister both play the role of the malicious dead, banshee heralds at best and breath-sucking demons at worst. Perhaps that’s also why Louis has a flash of Ellie as an adult. It’s a familiar experience for any parent, hopeful and disconcerting all at once. Adulthood is the goal: we want our kids to grow and learn and become independent people in their own right. But to grow is also to die. And to grow is to push your parents ahead of you into time, or back into the past, to become sort-of-interesting people in old photos. “Why can’t you stay this age forever?” can be a treacly sentiment, torn to tissue paper when you’re forcibly reminded that said age involves a lot of tantrums—except that it also reflects the grim awareness that time equals death. Ellie’s not completely off base, to deny death’s power by threatening never to give birth. God save the past, Louis thinks. But the past is at war with the future. Ellie is willing, at least, to work with Rachel to continue Norma’s tradition of oatmeal cookies. On the one hand this is a very childlike way to approach mourning. There’s a particular great-aunt whom I remember mostly for her stash of Andes Candies—I was probably about Ellie’s age when she died. At the same time, we carry the memory of the dead through their recipes, and keep some part of them alive by baking in their honor. I wouldn’t dream of making a chocolate chip banana bread other than my mother’s, or holding Thanksgiving without her creamed onions. They’re delicious, but they’re also hers, and I can be her at least a little when I make them. This book is so strange. One chapter I can be rolling my eyes at Louis’s unthinking sexism and almost-gently toxic masculinity, the next I can tear up over the all-too-adult emotions associated with parenting, laugh over the truth of couch-bottom magnetism, and beg Louis to more regularly tell his son he loves him. You can do that in front of your wife and daughter! I don’t care if it’s 1984, get over the limits of your upbringing and do it now! Because you never know how much time you have left to tell someone you love them. That knowledge, worst of secrets, is reserved for we poor readers. Anne’s Commentary In The Hobbit’s famous game of riddles in the dark, the last one Gollum asks Bilbo almost defeats our hero: This thing all things devours;Birds, beasts, trees, flowers;Gnaws iron, bites steel;Grinds hard stones to meal;Slays king, ruins town,And beats mountain down. Bilbo gets the answer accidentally, by calling for the thing he needs most at that moment: Time. As Louis Creed is learning, Time is the thing all mortals need most. During his first conversation with Ellie about death, he describes Gollum’s Devourer as befits a scientist and clinician, objectively, even fatalistically. Death is the end result of metabolism, a biological clock that must eventually run down. Driving home after Norma’s funeral, Ellie again asks why people have to die, and Louis has to admit that, scientist and clinician though he is, he doesn’t really know. He falls back on the classic reply, that Nature’s solution to overpopulation is for the old to die and so make room for the young. Louis doesn’t mention Nature’s other dictum, that some creatures have to die to feed other creatures. Circle of Life, kid, remember the song from The Lion King? Wait, that movie’s still ten years in the future. Never mind Mufasa and Simba. In 1984, Oz the Gweat and Tewwible has been around for a long time, and Louis has begun to adopt Rachel’s embodiment of death as that dreadful wizard—pre Oz’s exposure as a conman, of course. He’s also adopting her death-bogeyman, Zelda of the black tongue. Rachel’s thanatophobia doesn’t seem so irrational to Louis now. Not after Church has knocked the foundation out from under his core certainties. For Louis, time begins to look like what Bilbo first considers after Gollum’s riddle: “Poor Bilbo sat in the dark thinking of all the horrible names of all the giants and ogres he had ever heard of in tales, but not one of them had done all these things [Gollum had listed.]” As Louis oscillates between seeing time as a neutral fact and seeing time as a monster, he grows anxious at signs of its passage. At the funeral, sitting by Ellie in her new navy blue, he’s no longer blinded to complacency by his love for her; instead he sees her slipping from “the first great developmental stage” of “almost pure curiosity” (should we read innocence?) Watching her leave the church in a “swirl” of that navy blue, he’s “uneasily struck by how adult she looked.” Jud’s “husky young cousins or nephews” aren’t merely welcome additions to the labor of pallbearing: They give Louis occasion to ponder how the present slides inexorably into the past and to conclude that one day, like Jud and Norma, he’ll be dusty history to his descendants. “God save the past,” Louis thinks. That is, his own past, and so he shivers. The next chapter, Thirty-Four, is all about time passing. Ellie turns six. The flu epidemic ebbs. “Blue, still, subzero” February yields to March, still rough but “straining to be April.” Jud’s grief mellows at a gradual, healthy pace. Gage gets his first haircut. All these passages are positive things. But they are passages, steps taken from the Creeds’ generally comfortable and now immutable past into a changing present and uncertain future. I won’t stop to wait on your convenience, Time says. It’s Death that will stop for you, maybe kindly as in Emily Dickinson’s poem, maybe not so kindly. Want to know something else? Death itself may be only another realm of Time, where you’ll see things you can’t unsee, things that will change you, not necessarily for the good. Consider Church. What can the cat have witnessed to turn its eyes that yellowy-green that makes you believe for a heart-lurching moment it’s Zelda in Gage’s closet? Not that Church is a comfortable housemate any longer, and there the damn thing is, staring at Gage on this most joy-filled day of his life, and possibly of Louis’s as well. Gollum was right, Louis. Time is the Devourer. God save the past. That was Louis’s cri de coeur at the funeral. In the past, Louis will always be a boy flying his first kite and imagining himself soaring with it and “staring down as the world took on its actual shape.” In the past, he will always enter into Gage’s “tiny house” of a body and share Gage’s exultation at “flyne” that Vulture as “the wind…bloomed a wild rose” in his cheek. March 24, 1984. It’s the day in the novel when Gage finally takes center stage and becomes for the reader a “real” person, vital and infinitely dear. It’s also what Louis will believe “the last really happy day of his life.” King hits us with this foreshadowing in the first line of Chapter Thirty-Five. In the next sentence, we learn that the “things that were to come, poised above [the Creeds] like a killing sashweight” are only “seven weeks in the future.” That Louis has picked a kite in the shape of a vulture is in itself a blatant ill omen. What was he thinking? My idea is that in Louis’s subconscious, controlling a vulture kite is figuratively mastering Death, if only by changing it from an object of dread to one of joy. At the peak of this father-and-son moment, King drops his final bomb: “And Gage, who now had less than two months to live, laughed shrilly and joyously. ‘Kite flyne! Kite flyne, Daddy!’” If that paragraph doesn’t kick you in the gut, I don’t know what to say. But I won’t accuse you of having no heart. Maybe King’s three outright statements of coming doom strike you as too much, and yeah, I do remember, he dropped a similar one prior to Norma Crandall’s death. That criticism I can understand. Especially given the chapter-closing omen of Church lurking in Gage’s closet, avatar of Death that the cat’s become. Is King using good technique here? On the whole, I think so. On the whole, I think his foreshadowing throws the kind of shade some random cloud may cast over you on an otherwise sunny day, all the blacker for the brilliance everywhere else. Next week, E.F. Benson’s “The Outcast” gives us another tale of burials gone wrong.[end-mark] The post The Joy of the Vulture: Stephen King’s <i>Pet Sematary</i> (Part 11) appeared first on Reactor.

The Democrats were distraught when Rachel Maddow negotiated with her Comcast paymasters to do her show only one night a week. What would the Left do with their Maddow magic cut by 80%? For media critics, Maddow has been tougher to analyze as a cable “news” host. She goes on long pseudo-intellectual benders of historical analysis and then tries to bring it right up to today’s politics. She especially loves identifying Hitler sympathizers from the 1930s and attaching it to today’s Republicans. It’s like making Joy Reid sound more ponderous and in-depth, even if it’s not. On Monday, on the cusp of the vice presidential debate, Maddow naturally sought to connect Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, to a series of antisemitic and fascist revolutionaries who wanted the universities destroyed in the 1930s and 1940s because they spread “communistic” ideas. Viewers were “treated” to nine minutes of this lecture, which began with the founder of Walgreens dragging his niece out of the University of Chicago. Then came more “unearthed” video of Vance from 2021, before he ran for the Senate. Vance gave a speech titled “The Universities Are the Enemy.” To Maddow, this sounds like the hayseeds are against “book learning.” Or Vance is rebelling against his time at Yale Law School? We’re supposed to overlook that you can barely find a conservative professor in our most prestigious institutions of higher education. The last survey found only 1% of Harvard professors identified as conservative. The idea that “Harvard hates America” has been around for decades, and it’s been true for decades.  As Vance put it, “You go to Harvard and put your preferred pronouns in your bio and learn to hate people in the heartland.” Vance dared to say, “The universities do not pursue knowledge and truth. They pursue deceit and lies.” They are “fundamentally corrupt.” This sounds like MSNBC talking about Fox News and Newsmax. But worse yet, Vance is also upset about woke corporations—like Maddow’s DEI paymasters at Comcast. So Maddow warned Vance has “a larger plan to destroy all the things which conservatives don’t have complete control over.” It’s like MSNBC wants all Republicans to sound like “MSNBC Republicans.” This is a fascinating claim at a time when former Secretary of State John Kerry is complaining at the World Economic Forum that “Our First Amendment stands as a major block to the ability to be able to hammer [disinformation] out of existence.” They pose as guardians of democracy, but they can’t really stand it in practice. Then she found Vance in a podcast talking about anti-Americanism in the schools and how we should “rip out like a tumor the current American leadership class and then reinstall some sense of American political religion.” That’s easy to say, but pretty impossible to accomplish. Wild talk of firing all the professors, all the government employees, and “draining the swamp,” scares the Left, but it’s not something you can do in a democratic system. Vance made all these remarks before being elected to the Senate, so it might be interesting now to learn how much he thinks can be accomplished by joining the so-called swamp in Washington. In the end, Maddow thinks it’s incredibly weird to associate college professors with Marxism, but she doesn’t think it’s a wacky conspiracy theory to find some villainous Hitler sympathizer from the 1930s and staple them to JD Vance, who is not a neo-Nazi. A Rachel Maddow puppet is featured in “Let’s Be Real,” a comedy special covering politics, pop culture, and the 2020 election on Oct. 1, 2020, on the Fox News Channel. Maddow fancies herself a historian and seems to be obsessed with WWII-era fascism. (Fox/Getty Images) What Maddow does isn’t “news.” It’s hurling nasty invective in a way that sounds like she’s reading a term paper—one that deserves a failing grade. COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post Pseudo-Historian Maddow Smears Vance as Fascist Speech-Squelcher appeared first on The Daily Signal.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. New legislative proposals in Australia, that those behind them say are aimed at curbing “disinformation,” are rejected by opponents as the biggest yet assault on free opinion and speech in the country. The biggest such attack, at least “in peacetime” – this is how Institute of Public Affairs Director of Law and Policy John Storey qualified what he sees in this unprecedented effort – but the Australian authorities have been engaged in their “war on disinformation” for a while now. We obtained a copy of the bill for you here. The bill containing the new laws was introduced in parliament earlier in September by Communications Minister Michelle Rowland, who continued to brand what the government decided to consider as misinformation and disinformation “a serious threat” that affects Australia’s safety and well-being. Peacetime? Judging by this rhetoric, it doesn’t sound like the country’s ruling class is living in any kind of political peacetime. In order to establish their version of the ideal, threat-free society, the laws would fine companies deemed to be enabling disinformation, etc., on their platforms by taking up to five percent of their global revenue. In order to prevent the proliferation of “disinformation,” companies are expected to introduce (yet more) rules (“codes of contact”) that deal with it via “an approved regulator.” More transparency and accountability is how Rowland chose to interpret the situation, should the proposals become law (the goal is to get this done by the end of 2024). The opposition is warning that several other provisions (up to seven years of prison time in cases of doxxing, and giving parents the right to sue, if they feel their children are subjected to “serious privacy invasions”) – will in reality produce a chilling effect on political speech as well. The reason for this angle in criticizing the proposals championed by Rowland is the (usual for this type of effort) wide-ranging nature of the draft legislation. Wide enough, in fact, to apply to election candidates and referendum proposals, a spokesman for the Australian opposition Coalition was warned. Hand in hand with the hunger for sweeping powers, with disinformation scaremongering at the center, come vague definitions. The spokesman, David Coleman, says that the legal proposal seeks to treat something as misinformation if it can be “reasonably verifiable” (by whom, based on what exact criteria?) as false, misleading, or deceptive information – but also “reasonably likely ” to cause serious harm or contribute to it. Applied to the election process, this means whatever’s decided to be misinformation about candidates and referendum proposals. “By stating in black and white that ‘information about electoral candidates or referendum proposals’ can be captured as misinformation, the government is making clear that this legislation will go to the core of our democracy,” Coleman commented. The spokesman also noted that the bill wants to put tech companies in a position where they decide – while facing massive monetary fines or even prison – what kind of information relating to elections and referendums should be available to Australians. Of interest, as an insight into the way the Australian government thinks about and treats these issues, is that the current proposal it seeks to fast-track in parliament is actually the “second draft” to change the existing anti-disinformation laws. The government had to abandon the first over much the same type of criticism. X owner Elon Musk decided to rattle yet another government’s cage for its anti-free speech policies – and pressure put on social platforms – referring to those behind Australia’s proposals as “fascists.” This hasn’t failed to elicit a response, where Labor Assistant Treasurer Stephen Jones dismissed Musk’s opinion as “crackpot” and decided to play the sovereignty card. It’s up to the Australian government what it does to Australians, is the gist of the “argument.” And Jones added combating scammers and criminals to Rowland’s list of “serious threats to safety and well-being.” Institute of Public Affairs’ John Storey, however, sees this dramatic talk about big problems and consequences to be allegedly solved by the bill as “disingenuous.” The real goal, according to him – (and no doubt bearing in mind the broadness and vagueness of it all, from the scope to the “definitions”) – is no more than an attempt to let government bureaucrats position themselves as arbiters of “official” truth. Political censorship will be the result, Storey believes, and the government is pushing the bill while (ab)using legitimate worries about Australia’s societal issues, as well as those parents have about their children’s safety on the internet. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Australia’s Free Speech Crosshairs: Sweeping Anti-Disinformation Bill Draws Fierce Backlash appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

More People Trying to Get Into North Korea?

The animal's wound looked old and it had been eating normally until it was caught off the southern Albanian coast.

The roots of human facial expressions might go back a very long way.

The Mount Po Ma Lung toothed toad has a row of tiny teeth on the roof of its mouth.