text:
Chronic inflammation can increase the risk of serious diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, cancer, autoimmune diseases, depression, arthritis, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease.
Chronic inflammation has no visible symptoms and is therefore difficult to detect. But it doesn’t hurt to be proactive and simply eat a diet that reduces inflammation.
Here is the best food that can reduce chronic inflammation in the body.
The best food to reduce inflammation
According to experts, omega 3 works wonders in reducing inflammation. Eating foods rich in omega 3, such as salmon and other fatty fatty fish, is your best bet in the fight against chronic inflammation.
EPS and DHA in omega 3 play a role in the prevention of pro-inflammatory compounds and inflammatory processes and promote the production of anti-inflammatory compounds.
Studies have shown that taking omega 3 supplements helps fight inflammation associated with rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn’s lupus, type 1 diabetes, asthma, psoriasis, heart disease and more.
Various other researchers have shown that taking omega 3 supplements for four months reduced inflammation in middle-aged and older adults.
Not only foods rich in omega 3, but also other 3 foods that can help fight inflammation. These include leafy vegetables, crispy vegetables and berries. It can also help to include leafy vegetables in your daily diet and have berries several times a week.
Regular regular leafy vegetables can reduce the risk of heart disease, type 2 diabetes, cancer and brain damage. Add 6 cups of various green vegetables to your weekly diet, such as lettuce, spinach, kale, etc.
According to the study, people who ate 2 cups of cruciferous vegetables a day for two weeks saw an improvement in inflammatory markers.
Focus on at least 5 servings of vegetables such as broccoli, sprouts, cauliflower, cabbage, kale, bok choy, arugula and radish
Blueberries, strawberries, raspberries, cranberries and blackberries are full of antioxidants and anthocyanins, which fight free radicals that promote inflammation. Try to have at least two cups of berries a week.
Foods that increase inflammation
Now that you know the foods you should eat to reduce inflammation, you also need to know the foods you should avoid.
Low fiber foods, refined carbohydrates, added sugars and artificial sweeteners, fried foods, fats, fats, saturated fats and processed meat should be avoided.
Too much alcohol and caffeine can also increase inflammation. Avoid these foods and be sure to add omega 3, leafy vegetables, berries and crispy vegetables to your daily diet to reduce inflammation.


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W823$ | ImpartED Joy: Write/Illustrate/Publish
- Room: NORTH 330B
- Session Number: W823$
Thursday, January 27, 2022: 10:30 AM - 12:30 PM
The creative process of writing, illustrating, and publishing children's books bring JOY to life. How do you begin? What is the story and message you want to share? The expressions, characters, and simple sketches enhance the writings with warm emotion as they visually serenade the viewer into the story. The mission is to provide a meaningful written and illustrated experience on every page that captivates the heart. We will go on a journey to take the steps to write/illustrate/self-publish your original work that you desire to share!
All workshops are BYOD (Bring Your Own Device). Participants are responsible for bringing a wifi enabled device with all workshop software/apps downloaded before attending.

domain: artistic


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"Suspicious Minds" is a 1968 song written and first recorded by American songwriter Mark James. After this recording failed commercially, it was cut by Elvis Presley with producer Chips Moman, becoming a No. 1 song in 1969, and one of the most memorable hits of Presley's career.
|Single by Mark James|
|B-side||"A Taste of Heaven"|
|Genre||Rock and roll, pop|
|Single by Elvis Presley|
|B-side||"You'll Think of Me"|
|Released||August 26, 1969|
|Recorded||January 23, 1969|
|Studio||American Sound Studio, Memphis, Tennessee|
|Producer(s)||Chips Moman and Felton Jarvis|
|Elvis Presley singles chronology|
"Suspicious Minds" was one of the singles that revived Presley's chart success in the U.S., following his '68 Comeback Special. It was his eighteenth and last No.1 single in the United States. Rolling Stone ranked it No. 91 on their list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. Session guitarist Reggie Young played on both the James and Presley versions.
The song is about a mistrusting and dysfunctional relationship, and the need of the characters to overcome their issues in order to maintain it. Written in 1968 by Mark James, who was also co-writer of "Always on My Mind" (which Presley would later record), the song was first recorded and released by James on Scepter Records in 1968. Chips Moman had asked James to come to Memphis to write songs for American Sound Studio. At the time, James was residing in Houston. He had written three songs that became No.1 hits in the Southern United States. American Sound Studio was gaining a reputation in the industry, as the Box Tops had just recorded "The Letter" there, so James relocated to Memphis.
James said that late one night, he was fooling around on his Fender guitar and using his Hammond organ pedals for a bass line and came up with what he thought was a catchy melody. At the time, he was married to his first wife but still had feelings for his childhood sweetheart, who was married back in Houston. James's wife had suspicions about his feelings. He felt it was a confusing time for him and that all three were "caught in this trap that they could not walk out of." At the recording session, James sang the lead vocals and the studio band backed him; Moman produced. The horns, strings, and vocals of the Holladay Sisters were later overdubbed. After the tape was mixed, James and Moman flew to New York, where James's manager had contacts with Scepter Records. The label loved the song and put it out, but Scepter did not have the money to promote new artists and the song did not make the charts.
Later that year, Don Crews, Moman's partner, told James that Presley had booked their studio to record what would become the From Elvis in Memphis album. Crews kept asking James if he had any songs that would be right for Presley. James felt Presley needed a mature rock 'n' roll song to bring him back, as Tom Jones was a hot artist at the time. Crews and James thought of "Suspicious Minds" and James began urging others to get Presley to hear it. Even though James's recording had not been commercially successful, upon reviewing the song, Presley decided he could turn it into a hit.
Presley's 1969 recordings at American Sound Studio were a direct consequence of the '68 Comeback Special, that interested Chips Moman in producing recordings in Presley's new style; he was making his comeback to the Memphis musical scene by recording rock, gospel, country, rhythm & blues, and soul. Marty Lacker, a close friend of Elvis, suggested he record at the studio. These sessions produced the album From Elvis in Memphis.
"Suspicious Minds" was a product of a session that took place between 4 and 7 a.m. on Thursday, January 23, 1969. James was in Memphis, but he was not at the recording session. A few days earlier, he had walked into the recording studio during a session and sensed that Elvis was uncomfortable with his presence. James did not want to jinx the song, so he stayed away. When he heard the track the day after it was recorded, he initially thought it sounded too slow. When he later heard the embellished version, he said he was blown away. In later years, whenever Elvis saw James, he would cross the room to say hello.
Production of the song was nearly scuttled over a copyright dispute. Elvis's business people said they wanted half of Moman's publishing rights. Moman accused them of stealing and threatened to halt the recording session. Harry Jenkins of RCA agreed with Moman because he sensed that "the song would be a big hit and there would be plenty to go around". The songs "I'll Hold You In My Heart (Till I Can Hold You In My Arms)", "Without Love (There Is Nothing)", and "I'll Be There" were recorded in the same session. On August 7, "Suspicious Minds" was again overdubbed to stereo and mono in Las Vegas, where the final master was produced. The song's time signature changes in the bridge section, from 4/4 to the slower 6/8, then back again to the faster 4/4 rhythm. The instrumental arrangement uses an electric guitar, bass guitar, organ, strings, trumpets, trombones, and drums.
RCA staff producer Felton Jarvis made the unusual decision to add a fade-out to the song starting at 3:36 and lasting for nearly 15 seconds before fading back in. The first verse then continues repeatedly until the song completely fades out. In a 2012 interview with Marc Myers of The Wall Street Journal, Moman disclosed that Jarvis was never happy with Elvis recording at American Sound Studio, saying "it was a control thing". Moman added, "So when Jarvis took the tape of 'Suspicious Minds', he added this crazy 15-second fade toward the end, like the song was ending, and brought it back by overdubbing to extend it. I have no idea why he did that, but he messed it up. It was like a scar in the song - a scar not too well-liked. Not that it mattered, though - soon after the song was released, Elvis was back on top of the charts". However, it could be argued that the fade-out is a reference to the lyrics ("caught in a trap\I can't walk out").
The song was later included on the legacy edition of From Elvis in Memphis and the follow that dream reissue of Back In Memphis.
Presley first performed the song at the Las Vegas International Hotel (later renamed the Hilton) on July 31, 1969, and the 45 rpm single was released 26 days later. It reached No.1 in the United States for the week of November 1 and stayed there for one week. It would be Presley's final No.1 single on the Billboard Hot 100, before his death ("Burning Love" in 1972 was a No.1 hit on the Cashbox chart; "The Wonder of You" in 1970, "Way Down" in 1977, and Junkie XL's remix of "A Little Less Conversation" in 2002 all hit No.1 on the British chart, followed by re-issues of several previous chart-toppers in 2005).
|Single by Fine Young Cannibals|
|from the album Fine Young Cannibals|
|B-side||"Prick Up Your Ears"|
|Released||January 2, 1986|
|Fine Young Cannibals singles chronology|
In 1986, the band Fine Young Cannibals' cover version, which features backing vocals by Jimmy Somerville, reached No. 8 on the UK Singles chart. Singer Roland Gift said that Elvis had come to him in a dream and told him he would record the greatest version of "Suspicious Minds" ever.
The Fine Young Cannibals' music video for the song was filmed in black and white and, for most of it, remains that way. However, the video is noted for its innovative use of colorization, following the bridge section of the song. The video pays homage to Elvis, both in its use of the monochrome filming (common during Elvis' early career) and the shiny spangled suits that the band wear in the second half of the video.
|Belgium (Ultratop 50 Flanders)||22|
|Canada Top Singles (RPM)||21|
|Germany (Official German Charts)||37|
|Netherlands (Single Top 100)||21|
|New Zealand (Recorded Music NZ)||14|
|UK Singles Chart||8|
|US Dance Club Songs (Billboard)||23|
|Single by Dwight Yoakam|
|from the album Honeymoon in Vegas Soundtrack|
|Dwight Yoakam singles chronology|
In 1992, country singer Dwight Yoakam recorded his version, for the soundtrack of the film Honeymoon in Vegas, and also filmed an accompanying video. The track was later released on his compilation album The Very Best of Dwight Yoakam.
|Canada Country Tracks (RPM)||51|
|US Hot Country Songs (Billboard)||35|
|"The Long and Winding Road / Suspicious Minds"|
|Single by Will Young / Gareth Gates|
|from the album From Now On / What My Heart Wants to Say|
|Released||September 23, 2002|
|Producer(s)||Stephen Lipson, Steve Mac|
|Will Young / Gareth Gates singles chronology|
Gareth Gates, a runner up of in the first series of the ITV talent show Pop Idol, released a cover version on BMG on September 23, 2002. The single was a double-A side record containing "The Long and Winding Road"/"Suspicious Minds" with the Beatles song performed by Will Young, the winner of the same Pop Idol series, and Gates, with Gates performing the Elvis song on his own.
The music video features Gates changing color, alternating between black and white in a white background, while clips from Lilo & Stitch are shown.
The single reached the top of the UK Singles Chart where it stayed for two consecutive weeks (charts of September 29, 2002 and October 6, 2002), following two other No. 1 songs of Gareth Gates which were also covers ("Unchained Melody" - No. 1 for 4 consecutive weeks in March and April 2002 and "Anyone of Us (Stupid Mistake)" - for 3 weeks in July 2002).
|UK Singles (OCC)||1|
Dee Dee Warwick, Dionne's sister, covered "Suspicious Minds" while Elvis Presley's version was still on the charts. Warwick's version was a minor U.S. pop hit, peaking at No. 80 in 1970. It reached No.24 on the Billboard R&B chart for May 8, 1971.
Waylon Jennings and Jessi Colter recorded the song for RCA in 1970. Their version reached No. 25 on the Billboard country chart in November of that year. The Jennings-Colter version was re-released by RCA in 1976, topping out at No. 2, and was included on the album Wanted! The Outlaws that same year. Their version was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Country Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal.

domain: entertainment


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The Vienna Forum of the Azerbaijani students studying in the European countries on the theme “Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno Karabakh conflict” will be held on October 26-27.
Spokesperson for the Azerbaijani Youth Forum Aynur Hasanzadeh said the Azerbaijani officials and experts will discuss the historical aspects of the Armenia-Azerbaijani Nagorno Karabakh conflict, humanitarian, legal and the other aspects of the negotiations process within the forum which is organized by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Youth and Sports, the Center for Strategic Studies under the President of the Republic of Azerbaijan, the Azerbaijani embassy in Austria, the Youth Foundation under the Azerbaijani Ministry of Youth and Sports, “The Azerbaijani community in Nagorno Karabakh” Public Union and ASAIF.
Azerbaijani students studying in the European countries at present, masters and doctors can apply to attend the forum.
Please fill application for the participation and send to email@example.com.
Application deadline expires on September 10.

domain: politics


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News: Abbotsford (28 Jan 1931)
Surnames: Amacher, Blake, Brether, Brown, Cornelius, Demand, Dempsey, Dickinson, Dolan, Fricke, Fryke, Fultz, Garbrecht, Goldamer, Grottke, Haas, Jackson, Johnson, Kelsey, Kinzi, Kluetch, Marg, Mouritz, Mundt, Munson, Olson, Parkhill, Perry, Peterson, Rouse, Scheeler, Silla, Strebe, Thomas, Treat, Trevalie
----Source: The Curtiss Advance (Curtiss, Clark Co., Wisconsin) Wednesday, January 28, 1931
Clarence Trevalie was home for the week end.
Jack Brown of Minneapolis spent the week visiting friends here.
Louis Mourtiz made a business call to Owen Thursday evening.
Wm. Haas of Stetsonville was a business caller here Thursday.
Mr. and Mrs. Kinzie and Charles Brown were Owen visitors Sunday.
Mr. and Mrs. James Fults and Mrs. Walter Fults drove to Park Falls Sunday.
Mrs. Ed. Munson of Withee, is here helping care for her father, Niles Parkhill.
Mr. and Mrs. Clarence Rouse and family were week end visitors with friends here.
Mrs. Herman Scheeler and Mrs. W. Marg of Granton and Mrs. Wm. Grottke and baby of Neillsville, visited at the Hans Amacher home Tuesday and attended the Legion Follies.
Mr. and Mrs. Chas. Blake and Mrs. R. H. Treat were Chippewa Falls callers Thursday.
Mr. and Mrs. Orin Perry and daughters visited relatives at Plainfield, Wisconsin Sunday.
Mrs. Carl Mundt of Colby and Mrs. H. J. Cornelius were Wausau callers Monday afternoon.
Mrs. N. G. Peterson of Milwaukee was called here Tuesday on account of the serious illness of her father Niles Parkhill.
Mrs. George Kelsey returned from Tomah Thursday. She was called there on account of the serious illness of her father.
Mr. and Mrs. Bob Demsey and Mr. and Mrs. Gust Sila and Mr. and Mrs. Iver Johnson were entertained at the Chris Brether home Sunday.
Mrs. G. Fyrke of Chicago spent several days this week with her brother and family Mr. and Mrs. Nick Kluetch.
Miss Frances Jackson went to Milwaukee Wednesday on business and will remain in that city for several days.
Mr. and Mrs. Harvey Garbrecht and friend from Minneapolis came Wednesday for a visit with Mr. Garbrecht’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Wm. Garbrecht.
Mrs. Adolph Fricke and son Paul and Mrs. H. Demand and Rev. Lawton were at the Marshfield hospital Monday calling on Mr. Fricke who is a patient there.
Mrs. Chas Blake was called to Minneapolis last Friday, her daughter having an attack of appendicitis. Mrs. Bland and Joyce came home Wednesday and Joyce will go to Marshfield for an operation as soon as she is able.
Harry Olson was on the sick list Wednesday and John Thomas did the cheese making in his absence.
Audrey and Elaine Golamer invited several of their girl friend to their home last Thursday evening to help them celebrate their birthday.
Wm. Dolan of Loyal spent Sunday with his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Peter Dolan.
Earl Dickinson spent a couple days last week with his sister, Mrs. Aug. Strebe.
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Show your appreciation of this freely provided information by not copying it to any other site without our permission.
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domain: library


Distance Scale of Our Planets
In physics, length scale is a particular length or distance determined with the precision of one order of magnitude. The concept of length scale is particularly important because physical phenomena of different length scales cannot affect each other[clarification needed] and are said to decouple. The decoupling of different length scales makes it possible to have a self-consistent theory that only describes the relevant length scales for a given problem. Scientific reductionism says that the physical laws on the shortest length scales can be used to derive the effective description at larger length scales.
The idea that one can derive descriptions of physics at different length scales from one another can be quantified with the renormalization group.


text:
Showing results for
North Atlantic Right Whale
Stretching up to 16.8 meters (55 feet) long and weighing up to 62 tons (70 tons),...
As a consumer, you can choose what kinds of seafood to buy. Some species are in...
Giant squid live up to their name: the largest giant squid ever recorded by...
Ocean acidification is sometimes called “climate change’s equally evil twin,”...
Sea Level Rise
The ocean never stops moving. When you visit the beach, waves roll in and recede...
Corals and Coral Reefs
Coral reefs are the most diverse of all marine ecosystems. They teem with life,...

domain: geography


text:
Pregnant women who lived in close proximity to fields and farms where chemical pesticides were applied experienced a two-thirds increased risk of having a child with autism spectrum disorder or other developmental delay, a study by researchers with the UC Davis MIND Institute has found. The associations were stronger when the exposures occurred during the second and third trimesters of the women's pregnancies.
The large, multisite California-based study examined associations between specific classes of pesticides, including organophosphates, pyrethroids and carbamates, applied during the study participants' pregnancies and later diagnoses of autism and developmental delay in their offspring. It is published online today in Environmental Health Perspectives.
"This study validates the results of earlier research that has reported associations between having a child with autism and prenatal exposure to agricultural chemicals in California," said lead study author Janie F. Shelton, a UC Davis graduate student who now consults with the United Nations. "While we still must investigate whether certain sub-groups are more vulnerable to exposures to these compounds than others, the message is very clear: Women who are pregnant should take special care to avoid contact with agricultural chemicals whenever possible."
California is the top agricultural producing state in the nation, grossing $38 billion in revenue from farm crops in 2010. Statewide, approximately 200 million pounds of active pesticides are applied each year, most of it in the Central Valley, north to the Sacramento Valley and south to the Imperial Valley on the California-Mexico border. While pesticides are critical for the modern agriculture industry, certain commonly used pesticides are neurotoxic and may pose threats to brain development during gestation, potentially resulting in developmental delay or autism.
The study was conducted by examining commercial pesticide application using the California Pesticide Use Report and linking the data to the residential addresses of approximately 1,000 participants in the Northern California-based Childhood Risk of Autism from Genetics and the Environment (CHARGE) Study. The study includes families with children between 2 and 5 diagnosed with autism or developmental delay or with typical development. It is led by principal investigator Irva Hertz-Picciotto, a MIND Institute researcher and professor and vice chair of the Department of Public Health Sciences at UC Davis. The majority of study participants live in the Sacramento Valley, Central Valley and the greater San Francisco Bay Area.
Twenty-one chemical compounds were identified in the organophosphate class, including chlorpyrifos, acephate and diazinon. The second most commonly applied class of pesticides was pyrethroids, one quarter of which was esfenvalerate, followed by lambda-cyhalothrin permethrin, cypermethrin and tau-fluvalinate. Eighty percent of the carbamates were methomyl and carbaryl.
For the study, researchers used questionnaires to obtain study participants' residential addresses during the pre-conception and pregnancy periods. The addresses then were overlaid on maps with the locations of agricultural chemical application sites based on the pesticide-use reports to determine residential proximity. The study also examined which participants were exposed to which agricultural chemicals.
"We mapped where our study participants' lived during pregnancy and around the time of birth. In California, pesticide applicators must report what they're applying, where they're applying it, dates when the applications were made and how much was applied," Hertz-Picciotto said. "What we saw were several classes of pesticides more commonly applied near residences of mothers whose children developed autism or had delayed cognitive or other skills."
The researchers found that during the study period approximately one-third of CHARGE Study participants lived in close proximity – within 1.25 to 1.75 kilometers – of commercial pesticide application sites. Some associations were greater among mothers living closer to application sites and lower as residential proximity to the application sites decreased, the researchers found.
Organophosphates applied over the course of pregnancy were associated with an elevated risk of autism spectrum disorder, particularly for chlorpyrifos applications in the second trimester. Pyrethroids were moderately associated with autism spectrum disorder immediately prior to conception and in the third trimester. Carbamates applied during pregnancy were associated with developmental delay.
Exposures to insecticides for those living near agricultural areas may be problematic, especially during gestation, because the developing fetal brain may be more vulnerable than it is in adults. Because these pesticides are neurotoxic, in utero exposures during early development may distort the complex processes of structural development and neuronal signaling, producing alterations to the excitation and inhibition mechanisms that govern mood, learning, social interactions and behavior.
"In that early developmental gestational period, the brain is developing synapses, the spaces between neurons, where electrical impulses are turned into neurotransmitting chemicals that leap from one neuron to another to pass messages along. The formation of these junctions is really important and may well be where these pesticides are operating and affecting neurotransmission," Hertz-Picciotto said.
Research from the CHARGE Study has emphasized the importance of maternal nutrition during pregnancy, particularly the use of prenatal vitamins to reduce the risk of having a child with autism. While it's impossible to entirely eliminate risks due to environmental exposures, Hertz-Picciotto said that finding ways to reduce exposures to chemical pesticides, particularly for the very young, is important.
"We need to open up a dialogue about how this can be done, at both a societal and individual level," she said. "If it were my family, I wouldn't want to live close to where heavy pesticides are being applied."
Other study authors include Estella M Geraghty, Daniel J. Tancredi, Lora D. Delwiche, Rebecca J. Schmidt, Beate Ritz and Robin L. Hansen, all of UC Davis.
The work was supported by grants from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences R01-ES015359, P01-ES011269 and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Science to Achieve Results (STAR) grants R833292 and 829338. The study is available free of charge at: http://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/1307044/
At the UC Davis MIND Institute, world-renowned scientists engage in collaborative, interdisciplinary research to find the causes of and develop treatments and cures for autism, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), fragile X syndrome, 22q11.2 deletion syndrome, Down syndrome and other neurodevelopmental disorders. For more information, visit mindinstitute.ucdavis.edu
Phyllis Brown | Eurek Alert!
Biofilm discovery suggests new way to prevent dangerous infections
23.05.2017 | University of Texas at Austin
Another reason to exercise: Burning bone fat -- a key to better bone health
19.05.2017 | University of North Carolina Health Care
Staphylococcus aureus is a feared pathogen (MRSA, multi-resistant S. aureus) due to frequent resistances against many antibiotics, especially in hospital infections. Researchers at the Paul-Ehrlich-Institut have identified immunological processes that prevent a successful immune response directed against the pathogenic agent. The delivery of bacterial proteins with RNA adjuvant or messenger RNA (mRNA) into immune cells allows the re-direction of the immune response towards an active defense against S. aureus. This could be of significant importance for the development of an effective vaccine. PLOS Pathogens has published these research results online on 25 May 2017.
Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus) is a bacterium that colonizes by far more than half of the skin and the mucosa of adults, usually without causing infections....
Physicists from the University of Würzburg are capable of generating identical looking single light particles at the push of a button. Two new studies now demonstrate the potential this method holds.
The quantum computer has fuelled the imagination of scientists for decades: It is based on fundamentally different phenomena than a conventional computer....
An international team of physicists has monitored the scattering behaviour of electrons in a non-conducting material in real-time. Their insights could be beneficial for radiotherapy.
We can refer to electrons in non-conducting materials as ‘sluggish’. Typically, they remain fixed in a location, deep inside an atomic composite. It is hence...
Two-dimensional magnetic structures are regarded as a promising material for new types of data storage, since the magnetic properties of individual molecular building blocks can be investigated and modified. For the first time, researchers have now produced a wafer-thin ferrimagnet, in which molecules with different magnetic centers arrange themselves on a gold surface to form a checkerboard pattern. Scientists at the Swiss Nanoscience Institute at the University of Basel and the Paul Scherrer Institute published their findings in the journal Nature Communications.
Ferrimagnets are composed of two centers which are magnetized at different strengths and point in opposing directions. Two-dimensional, quasi-flat ferrimagnets...
An Australian-Chinese research team has created the world's thinnest hologram, paving the way towards the integration of 3D holography into everyday...
24.05.2017 | Event News
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26.05.2017 | Life Sciences
26.05.2017 | Life Sciences
26.05.2017 | Physics and Astronomy

domain: medical


text:
Our latest book from Parragon Books is the stunningly illustrated book The Adventures of the Owl and the Pussycat written by Coral Rumble and illustrated by Charlotte Cooke.
The story based on the poem The Owl and The Pussycat is about the adventures you can have just using your imagination.
It is the sweetest story and the illustrations are wonderful we really enjoy reading through the book.
I asked BG what she thought of the book:
‘It’s really good mummy’
What is your favourite part?
‘The bit with the octopus’
What do you think of the drawings?
‘They are lovely mummy’
BG gives it a big thumbs up.
You can purchase The Adventure of the Owl and the Pussycat RRP £5.99 from Amazon
Other Book Buddies Reviews:


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Hello again!! Here are some cards I made for Michele's challenge! Another sketch! I love sketches! The paper is mostly MME Good Day Sunshine with a teensy bit of bazzill and a playing card from Alphabet Soup, some stickles and some glossy accents on the cherry!
Off to make more! Enjoy!


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Those who like to go walking
may be interested to see who will become the new chief executive of the Ramblers after the current incumbent Tom Franklin revealed he is to step down.
Mr Franklin is to vacate the post at the end of the year, although he will still be associated with the organisation and will remain both a member of the government's forestry panel and a transitional trustee of the new charity set to take over from the abolished British Waterways quango.
Announcing his move to poverty and climate change charity Think Global, Mr Franklin said he is optimistic about the body's future and its capacity to influence matters in favour of those who like to put on their walking boots
and head for the outdoors.
"I am confident that the Ramblers is well placed to attract the next generation of walkers and to continue to achieve greater access for all," he stated.
The work of the forestry panel of which Mr Franklin is a member included a recent two-day visit to Kent which featured investigations into issues of woodland management, access and biodiversity.

domain: news


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I'm starting to sound like an old man. I'm starting to sound like my father. That's a tough concept to wrap one's head around as we age as parents, but it's there and there isn't much we can do about it. So what brought on this lamentation of age? Was it wisdom? Was it some epiphany about life that mixed with the contemplative nature of growing older and the motion in the universe? Not even close. No, good readers, I'm starting to sound like an old man because my kids' music sucks, and I told them so.
To be fair, it isn't "their" music. If you think about it, as I'm sure many of you have, the state of music has always been as such. There has always been mass produced Top-40 crap that has permeated the market to our constant displeasure. "This isn't music," we'd lament, pulling out our deep cuts vinyl collection and dusting off the record player to prove a point. That much hasn't changed. When I was younger, my father took one whiff of the synthesizer heavy 1980s and immediately intervened.
So while I was a physical child of the 1980s (actually born in the late 1970s) I was brought up on the music of the baby boomers. For me, there was Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull (who I've seen live four times and would like to forget they made music in the 1980s as it was terrible), The Who, Rolling Stones, Queen, David Bowie (Ziggy Stardust remains one of my favorite albums to date), Traffic, Emerson Lake & Palmer, Electric Light Orchestra, King Crimson (the original masters of progressive rock) and the list goes on. You get the point. I've even gone so far as to collect most of these groups albums on vinyl myself. More on that in a moment.
Where Elvis scared parents with his hip shaking, Lil' Wayne scares parents with his thuggish demeanor and propensity towards alcohol, violence, and dehumanizing women. There's a difference, but at the same time there isn't. On one hand we fear what we don't understand, on the other we fear what we do understand. In no way am I saying that Lil' Wayne will have the same influence on the state of music as Elvis, I'm saying that he exists because there is a market for what he does. In my opinion, it's not music, but many radio- and peer-influenced kids would disagree with that.
It's pointless to ask a child what they consider good music. Most of them have yet to be able to identify the subtleties that create good music. They'll know what they like though, and that's a start. The important thing is that they are listening, that they are beginning to understand what effect music has on our brains in our daily lives, from concentration to useful distraction to pure enjoyment. The question then becomes (and it's an age old question) are they being influenced, and if so, how much?
Considering the state of most of the music that is coming across the airwaves these days, hopefully the influence in behavior is slight. Music though has always been at the forefront of revolution. While it hasn't specifically started a revolution (besides a rock 'n' roll one) music has always provided the soundtrack for generation after generation. Through lyrics (think of all the music influences by the Vietnam war) that are suggestively reactive, music has intertwined with our worldly lives, whether we notice it or not. Of course, most of us wish we hadn't noticed the 1980s at all.


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Belén Gopegui - with its Borgesian/Nabokovian exploration of desire and place; loneliness and connection; and Sergio Prim’s attempt to “map the void” so that he and his lover can withstand it all—never disappoints
- Other Apps
Belén Gopegui, The Scale of Maps, Trans. by Mark Schafer, City Lights, 2011.
First three chapters: download here
Sergio Prim is a staid and solitary middle-aged man who finds himself suddenly in love. A geographer by trade, but with a broken radar when it comes to navigating human relationships, he is thrown into a psychological crisis by the romantic advances of Brezo Varela, a lively young woman who shares his profession. Haunted by a series of hallucinations in which he's relentlessly pursued by a cynical, vampire-like seductress whose promises of pleasure fill him with horror, Prim attempts to seek refuge by immersing himself in an obsessive metaphysical quest: he determines that he must map the way to a place in which love never results in disillusionment. The Scale of Maps is the story of Prim's struggle to choose between living in the external world that his lover inhabits or continuing to hide in the "hollows" of his inner world; an intimate and mercilessly revealing examination of a meager and fearful life challenged by desire.
"A fable of love-laid-waste, an almost scientific story of the anguish of existence, a profoundly and deliberately distorted image of perverse reality, its space and time, a tragedy replete with tenderness and humor."—ABC literario
“Gopegui is one of our most outstanding young names [in Spanish literature].”—El País
Another book that seems to have fallen under the radar, Gopegui’s debut novel is so impressive and unique that the translated literary world should be wringing their hands in impatient anticipation for her next work in English rather than not knowing her name. Any novel whose narrator begins by admitting that he’s lying is sure enough to get my attention, and The Scale of Maps—with its Borgesian/Nabokovian exploration of desire and place; loneliness and connection; and Sergio Prim’s attempt to “map the void” so that he and his lover can withstand it all—never disappoints. Gopegui’s prose moves seamlessly from philosophical diatribes to poetic passages that are infinitely quotable; Schafer’s translation is superb. A book for lovers, dreamers, readers, and those who are more than a little obsessed with maps. - K. Thomas Kahn
A geographer falls irredeemably in love with a flighty mapmaker in this graceful, peculiar Spanish tale. Sergio Prim, at 39 a self-described "small man" set in his bachelor ways, has begun an affair with a woman nine years his junior, Brezo Varela, whose vitality and passion for Sergio astonish him and wreak havoc on his orderly life. Being loved so fiercely by Brezo has disoriented him, and the narrative moves between the third and first person, depending on Sergio's increasingly unstable state. His instinct is to slip away and find his "hollow," a sanctuary safe from intrusion, "unencumbered by worry and marked by an intimate and benign invisibility." He takes off, ostensibly to do research in the mountains of Cuenca, and is haunted by thoughts of Brezo, even seeking the advice of a psychologist, while Brezo, wary of his absence, takes up with a Basque jai alai player. Gopegui's work is beautifully composed and elegantly translated, though Sergio's fundamental elusiveness leaves the reader empty-handed and lovelorn, which, depending on the reader, will be a disappointment or a stroke of brilliance. - Publishers Weekly
Belén Gopegui, in The Scale of Maps, quite elegantly rejects time and space. Consider:
…today you hear that an old friend has returned whom you had long ago decided was lost forever to a distant continent. It’s eight in the evening, you leave your house imagining the meeting, your happiness so irrepressible that you are laughing under your breath as you walk, because in the blink of any eye you have seen your past with that person and your future, the joy of being close. You board a bus, going down the list of places you are thinking of bring your friend, arm raised, hand gripping the dirty metal pole… But in fact it was all a false alarm. The person who had told you your friend was returning had mistaken the date or the name. Where were you while you were planning this meeting? If you answer “on the bus,” aren’t you committing a sin of imprecision, to say the least? What was the emotion you were feeling composed of and where was it located: forty-five minutes of palpable happiness incited by an illusory event?… to whom does that span of time, running counter to reality, belong?
Gopegui’s novel stalks this idea obsessively. The main character, Sergio Prim, calls it a “hollow,” a kind of pocket within the fabric of your surroundings into which you can retreat.
Sergio, is a shy, fidgety man. He is a cartographer by trade, but a cartographer who, while he finds comfort in maps -- “They establish a unique relationship between us and the world, as do books” -- doesn’t think they tell the whole story. His basic discomfort in the world leads him to believe that the world has some other nature that no one else sees, or no one else is looking for. He’s a little crazy, but he might be a genius.
What really throws him into a conniption is that there’s a girl who likes him. Her name is Brezo, and she is Sergio’s opposite. Her unfettered desire to be with Sergio -- to spend time in his company and make room for him in her life -- baffles him. When she proposes they go on a trip together, he protests, “I, who have spent just short of half a decade mastering the five hundred square feet of my apartment… it occurs to Brezo to propose an odyssey of train cars and luggage, unfamiliar beds and unpredictable breakfasts.”
From a purely practical standpoint, Sergio’s reactions are maddening. “You’re a hypochondriac cartographer!” one wants to shout, “date the pretty woman!” But Brezo’s attention puzzles him, and their differences puzzle him, and he spends most of the book puzzling about them. From a loftier standpoint, his befuddlement, which he elevates into an existential dilemma, is the tableau on which Gopegui muses.
Like Swann, Anna Karenina, and Don Quixote (all invoked) before him, Sergio’s relationship is Gopegui’s point of inquiry. But rather than examining social norms and constraints, she uses Sergio’s hand-wringing to question the very fabric of humanity, “to refute the links human beings habitually establish with their surroundings.”
It’s an ambitious novel, to be sure, made beautiful by Gopegui’s liquid prose, and made accessible by her ultimate refusal to answer her own questions. No matter how much Sergio keeps chewing on his theories -- removing himself from Brezo, and then from civilization, to focus on finding “hollows” in the world -- he never quite finds them, although he falls farther in love with the idea. “But isn’t it better, my friend, to go mad over nothing, over the leaf falling slowly through the air, over the pale cold, over the slightest thing?”- Janet Potter
“Trembling” is how protagonist Sergio Prim first appears to the reader. “His hands fluttered like a bashful magician’s,” the Spaniard Belen Gopegui writes of her fictional creation. Gopegui’s first novel, The Scale of Maps, is a story about a magic trick that Prim never quite masters, an ambitious disappearing act that ends in irredeemable failure. After all, as another character, the enchanting mapmaker Brezo Varela, warns Prim, “the problem with escape artists is that they never escape.”
Prim is no Houdini—he’s just a stubborn love-struck geographer battling his passions. He’s taken with Brezo, and though she returns his attentions, their relationship is less than simple. In Prim’s eyes, reality is no more than a cheap actress whose charms must be resisted—and for Prim, the prospect of requited love (with its seductive promise of “the things we already know are lies: eternal adoration, the invisible charm of normal life”) poses a particular threat. So he sets off in search of a “hollow,” an “unknown dwelling place” that he imagines can offer refuge from the assault of frail, vulgar reality. What results is a gradual, lyrical descent into eccentricity and isolation.
Nine years his junior, the beautiful Brezo— “a woman with ideas, outlandish and particular, all her own”—is a troublesome object of passion for Prim. Though she flits in and out of Prim’s life as in a dream, she adores him with a constancy that defies explanation. Prim is enamored—even obsessed—with her, but he doesn’t know how to let himself go. For one thing, he suspects a union like theirs is fated for destruction (“How might a woman with ideas of her own be placed in my discreet life in such a way that both of us would come out unscathed?” he asks). He harbors some more abstract reservations too. “Passion is chancy,” he says more than once, as if to reassure himself (and the reader) that his struggle against love’s tide is completely rational. And perhaps for Prim—a man who lives in a fortress of abstruse metaphors, abstract puzzles, savored emotions (‘’Like those old men who wrap leftover bread in napkins to take with them, I must take small steps when I leave the restaurant with my feelings in my pocket”) and solitude—it is.
Prim’s strange private world of thoughts and feelings is not without its peculiar charms. He keeps a “prayer book of evasion” filled with whimsical sketches representing misplaced eyeglass cases, holes in flat tires, and phrases like “exit right.” He reflects on a story about a man who charts a course through all of the world’s backyard swimming pools. He daydreams of becoming a simple agriculturalist and producing apples, round, radiant and wholesome. He tells fanciful stories that make Brezo laugh. He ponders mathematical myths:
It is said, my friends, that a number located between seven and eight was lost with the writings of Diophantus, the algebraist. Of course this is a legend, but I do not have to remind you of the theory that there can be no sign without a referent. It is tempting indeed. Imagine, my friends: another number, an hour every day outside the flow of time, a month unaccounted for every year between July and August.
For Prim, the temptation to remain outside the flow of time is irresistible. “I don’t want to leave my sanctuary and enter life,” he confesses. So he studies his affair with Brezo from afar, cultivating an inner remove that at times seems to serve only to amplify his emotions. For example, opening a letter from her he finds at his desk, he pauses:
As if at a concert, silent, trying not to cough, I listened to the music of her correspondence: letters, anachronistic declarations, quotations taken from books, little jokes . . .
The bulwark of his inner world may offer a kind of escape, but with its symphonic acoustics, it’s by no means a tranquil space. “What torture it is to hold on to reason as desire intensifies,” Prim thinks. But still, he can’t release himself.
Who is this strange man charting a fantastical, solitary course? Gopegui has been compared to Cervantes and Nabokov, and it’s easy to see Prim as a kind of windmill-battling Pnin. Prim’s labyrinthine imaginings could easily place him in a work of Borges as well. Prim is a geography student who doesn’t like to travel; he’s a young old man “sporting his first gray hairs, a short man with a large head, a man alone and full of sorrow.” After abandoning architecture studies and joining the army, “a general lack of direction” brings Prim to the study of geography. He gets a job writing reports for a government agency that serves to “thicken the purportedly indispensable annals of bureaucracy.” He marries and then separates from a dark-haired woman named Lucia. He keeps to himself.
Initially, Prim hopes his connection with his beguiling old classmate Brezo will assist his quest: “She would provide me with the scientific touchstone or black siliceous rock against which I would rub the gold of my imagination,” he thinks. Only later in the novel does Prim begin to square with himself. The experiments he’s designed in his search for the “hollow” are a farce. His elusive “hollow,” he admits, only exists as a metaphor. And yet he still imagines propositioning Brezo with it:
Let’s hide in a metaphor. When the pain comes, when it presses its sharp blade against us and covers the windows, when offense and misfortune come, we shall hide, warm and curled in a fetal position in a metaphor.
Prim predicts, accurately, that Brezo is far too practical for such proposals, and ultimately for him. Her adoration—and patience—for him eventually runs dry. “You will spend your whole life,” she tells him, “untying the knots you are tying yourself, looking for that hollow you have made up. And what use will it be to you?”
Indeed, the knots of Prim’s figurative world aren’t easily untangled. Many of Prim’s metaphors dangle with a precarious opacity: Mark Schafer’s agile translation gives Prim the fitting voice of a polished academic who has lost his bearings. “The man who examines his own love is like the merchant who sells perishable foods,” Prim suggests inscrutably. Is the reader to understand that Prim’s survival depends on his ability to shill the ripened fruits of his passion before they spoil? And to whom is he selling the harvest of his inspection? It’s just one of many alluring metaphors that quietly collapse upon inspection, evading scrutiny.
When Prim’s metaphors do hold up, their hopeless extravagance is almost laughable. The miles Prim puts between himself and Brezo are “sweet and bitter miles like orange marmalade, her favorite marmalade, so she had said one afternoon in my apartment.” It’s as though the more he grasps for purity (“Why in the world do you love me?” he silently asks Brezo, and “What in the world can I give you that can’t be corrupted?”), the more absurd and impotent his love becomes. So who can blame him if in the end, the perfect “pale and brilliant whirlwind” of Prim’s solitary construction is no match for that floozy, reality.
Gopegui’s ability to trap Prim in his own game is The Scale of Maps’s greatest strength and weakness. The book’s driving force comes from the power of Prim’s idiosyncrasies—and Goepeui deftly crafts her main character into a formidable literary device unto himself. Prim is incorrigibly odd, relentlessly consistent, and never at a loss for elegant words. Gopegui provides Prim with the self-awareness to appraise his own flaws, too. He realizes, for example, that the feelings he places so much importance on are of limited value:
. . . a man is alone with his feelings. And they—in the end, just sensations in his mind—are volatile, are diaphanous, fickle creatures, undulations that might possibly be useful for composing music but not for living.
But she stops short of letting him conquer his shortcomings, and here it becomes difficult to distinguish Prim’s excesses from the novel’s. "Trust me, Mr. Prim, one cannot lock oneself within a conviction as one might within a book," Prim's psychologist says, her sympathies for her patient dwindling. But in the final pages of The Scale of Maps, Prim does just that, retreating into those diaphanous notes of his feelings and thoughts like a solitary artist answering the call of his creativity. But of course it’s ultimately a failure of imagination that drives Prim into reclusiveness; in the end he can neither picture nor push himself to try to live a life that exists outside the world mapped in his mind. Is it Prim’s fault or the fault of Gopegui’s vision? In The Scale of Maps, it all depends on the reader’s perspective. - Mythili G. Rao
Sergio Prim, protagonist of Belén Gopegui's first novel, The Scale of Maps, is a shy, middle-aged geographer thrown into a hallucinatory quest by the romantic advances of his coworker, the somewhat younger, vibrant Brezo Varela. Fearing heartbreak, he searches for a concrete way to locate a refuge where he and Brezo might be safe from disillusionment. Prim's need to map that refuge raises questions about the nature of space and our understanding of it, as well as about love, reality, and storytelling.
Originally published in Spanish in 1993, The Scale of Maps is the first of Gopegui's seven novels to appear in English. La escala de los mapas won both the Tigre Juan and the Iberoamericano Santiago del Nuevo Extremo prizes. Made up of short chapters of varying length, the novel calls attention to itself as object. Words are consciously selected—not arbitrary—and the reader's attention is drawn to the visible presence of the printed letters, their size, scale, and spacing, much as one might notice the marks or legend on a map.
The novel places the reader, uncomfortably, within the disjointed experience of Sergio Prim. We see through his eyes—the more so, paradoxically, given the continual shifting of perspective between first and third person narration. The novel is full of arresting images and sentences to share aloud, and Mark Schafer's word choices bring the book into a suitably stark and unsettling English. One memorable description: "I had gotten out of bed in the key of Brezo, and all day Monday resembled a mountain pass she had seized." As Prim observes of the shift between nook and look, "one letter can alter a man's entire life." Prim is struggling to delineate his own experience, but that letter-by-letter shift is also at the heart of translation.
Prim calls the space he is looking for a "hollow," which seems to me an apt rendering of the Spanish hueco, which might also be a hole or a cavity; hollow is more forgiving, more spacious in its ambiguity, which is exactly the tone this novel requires. Moreover, as well as being a possible refuge, the hollow begins to describe the ongoing presence of the absent lover, continually present in imagination, in memory, in the physical sensations of longing.
This is a novel to read not for plot but for the movement between moments, the startling observations, the ambivalence of a narrator by turns sympathetic and maddening. Though Prim is not an unheard-of surname in Spanish, it seems particularly well-suited to this character in English. It is often difficult to tell just what is real, what has happened and what has been imagined. Prim himself observes that to imagine is also a way to possess. Seldom explicitly stated, this understanding is an important thematic thread in the novel, as the reader also comes to possess an imagined Sergio Prim. The lonely, unbalanced narrator is at times so wholly persuasive that the reader is caught up in the twisting logic of his loss and his hope:
When alone, I would argue with myself, employing felicitous phrases like 'perpetual help' and 'our lady of the abandoned.' When alone, I could bear the knowledge that no man is a maiden, that maidens are figments of literature. I have no comfort to offer you, my friend. I scour the closets, rummage through my past and in books, imagine promises, but who can replace the things you wish you had done with your father and will not do.The use of "maiden" in English carries not only the necessary gender information, but a welcome echo of Donne's "no man is an island," a subtle, geographical note that both reinforces and clarifies Sergio Prim's predicament. Sound is important to narrative as well as to poetry, and the attention to sound is a strength of Schafer's translation. The Scale of Maps is a meditative, obsessive novel, rewarding in the clarity of its expression and the provocation of its questions. As the end of the novel makes clear, it is the posing of those questions—the journey—-that is most important. My favorite line, perhaps, is the last: "Lift your hand and watch space stop." - Amalia Gladhart
The most indispensable writer of the 20th century, Jorge Luis Borges, included a short story about a mythic map in A Universal History of Infamy. The story is about one hundred words long and concerns a “Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it.” The map is impractical and the imperial advisors discard it. In the end, both the discarded map and the incomplete story are cast as Ozymandias-type fragments:
In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.
Cartography as quixotic undertaking is also a theme of the indelible first novel of Belén Gopegui, a Madrid-based writer. The Scale of Maps, owing partly to its short, honed chapters, is brisk, taut storytelling. Its protagonist-narrator, Sergio Prim, describes his unusual love affair with another cartographer, his troubles at work, and the metaphysical debates he has with other mapmakers. Throughout the novel he openly questions both his own psychological reliability and ability to handle human relationships. At times, he clearly fabricates conversations and events. This novel of ideas never feels contrived or schematic.
As in Rivka Galchen’s Atmospheric Disturbances or John Lanchester’s great The Debt to Pleasure, the first-person narrator is mad, and his madness defamiliarizes the banal rituals of intimacy. Throughout the novel, Sergio Prim, a quixotic mapmaker in the Borgesian tradition, makes repeated claims for the explanatory power of myth, abstraction, and non-empirical truths. As a geographer and as a madman, he blurs the line between sign and referent.
It leads Sergio to produce off-kilter flourishes like this: “I have always liked examining people’s topographical features, catching them unawares as they rest their hands in a moment of inattention, their sonorous and pensive profile or their black moustache, their dark tragedy.”
The reader comes to realize that the narrator’s intellectualism is a self-defense mechanism. He describes himself this way: “I am Albania. My natural climate is temperate, it is composed of scraps of unsanitary plains, rugged plateaus, and a collection of abrupt mountains. In my republic, we practice the autarchy of retreat: production for the purpose of self-sufficiency and to protect ourselves from foreign influence.”
Sergio is preoccupied by a theory of the “hollow”—a negative space that gives order and meaning to his life. As a geographer, he compares it to the time before maps, before the first world map created by Anaximander, when the world was “exaggerated and self-absorbed.” He is paralyzed by doubt, though no less loquacious for it: “Circumstances always get the better of men. I completely understand those admirals who never manage to engage a single ship in battle, who fight the elements their whole lives long.”
The woman that the protagonist pines for is Brezo Varla, whose smile “is as wide as a gong.” Here, Gopegui, a committed Marxist, is playing some of the same post-modern name games that have come down to us through Pynchon. In Spanish, “Brezo” means “to fall asleep,” and Varla is the name of a 19th-century priest in Cuba whose name has been taken up by an organization calling for political reform there.
Shafer’s translation recreates the humor and intelligence of Gopegui’s novel. The Spaniard’s humor is distinctly literary, always specific, and never condescending. By taking up the evocative language of geography—its “errors in scale,” the “architects of utopias”—Gopegui runs the risk of dull metaphor, but her narrative instincts are sharp enough to avoid that pitfall. Instead, gratefully, Brezo or Dona Elena, Sergio’s supervisor, are wry foils to Sergio’s grand theories.
At one point, Sergio Prim tells Brezo, “Don’t believe anything because, at the least, you will be protecting a sensitive, almost liquid, shifting, and turbulent system that is somewhat mysteriously called your sense of humor.”
The novelists Roberto Bolaño and Francisco Umbral and the critic Idoya Puig are not alone in placing Gopegui among the finest Spanish-language writers working today. After The Scale of Maps made a splash on the Spanish-language literary scene in 1993, she went on to write over ten other novels, including The Conquest of the Air (1998) and The Father of White (2007), though unfortunately only The Scale of Maps is available in English. She shares some of the rueful tone and brazen stylistic improvisations of her contemporaries, Enrique Vila-Matas and Javier Marias, but her work has taken much longer to find its way into Anglophone bookstores.
In an interview in El Mundo, Gopegui asked which of her books to start with and she answered The Scale of Maps, “if you are interested in the possibility of intervening and changing reality.” Perhaps a translator is churning out pages of her other celebrated novels as I write. The Scale of Maps is a rapturous and dazzling achievement, and I, for one, am waiting impatiently for the opportunity to read more of Gopegui. - John Yargo


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Rosie’s Rap on Rap
by Wendy Cook 5/2/07
Whatever the reason for Rosie O’Donnell leaving ABC’s program “The View,” there is no question that she made a number of statements that raised eyebrows. One statement that didn’t get a lot of attention was her defense of rap music in the wake of the Don Imus controversy. She claimed, “There’s something different about young black artists living their reality…and using the clay of their life to form the art that becomes their vessel.”
But Rosie didn’t do her research. Not all rappers are “living their reality” that their music portrays. For example, T-Pain, a popular rapper, was born and raised in Tallahassee, Florida, to a regular middle-class family. His parents own a chain of local seafood restaurants.
Wendy Cook is a staff writer for Accuracy in Academia, and can be contacted at email@example.com
[go to Cook index]
Rich Boy (born Maurice Richards), who uses defamatory or racist remarks, was a student enrolled as a mechanical engineering major at Tuskegee University before he caught the eye of Interscope Records. His song, “Throw Some D’s,” includes the following lyrics:
“Rich Boy sellin' crack f**k n***as wanna jack S**t tight no slack just bought a Cadillac Took it to the chop shop Got the d**n top dropped two colored flip flopped Candy red lollipop There’s h**s in the parking lot.”
I searched azlyrics.com for the word “hoe” and the results showed 1,145 songs that referenced the word, and I’m pretty sure they’re not talking about the gardening tool. But even still, should a rapper’s past be used as a crutch and justification to degrade others?
Apart from the degrading lyrics, the hip-hop culture in its entirety is negatively affecting today’s youth. A recent study by the RAND Corporation presented “the strongest evidence yet” that sexually degrading lyrics in music encourage teenagers to more quickly initiate sexual intercourse and other sexual activities.
“These portrayals objectify and degrade women in ways that are clear, but they do the same to men by depicting them as sex-driven studs,” said Steven Martino, a RAND psychologist who led the study. “Musicians who use this type of sexual imagery are communicating something very specific about what sexual roles are appropriate, and teen listeners may act on these messages.”
This could also affect what adolescents come to expect from future relationships. “It may be that girls who are repeatedly exposed to these messages expect to take a submissive role in their sexual relationships and to be treated with disrespect by their partners,” said Martino. “These expectations may then have lasting effects on their relationship choices. Boys, on the other hand, may come to interpret reckless male sexual behavior as ‘boys being boys’ and dismiss their partners’ feelings and welfare as unimportant.”
The rap audience is not a small one either. Fifty-eight percent of Black youth say they listen to rap music every day as do 45% of Hispanic and 23% of White youth, according to the University of Chicago’s new study the “Black Youth Project.”
However, youth are not completely naïve about the degrading messages in rap music: 72% of Black and Hispanic youth agree that rap music videos contain too many references to sex, and so do 68% of White youth. The study also showed that over half of females and males of all three races agree that rap music videos portray Black women in “bad and offensive ways.”
An unidentified 17-year-old male participant in the BYP study said:
“In the videos…I dislike the way they objectify women…I think…if you were just to watch music videos and never have met a Black person in your life, you probably would think ill of Black people altogether…White people probably think that Black people don’t care about anything but sex and selling drugs and partying all the time. I mean, that’s the images you get from rap music videos, pretty much.” CRO
2007 Accuracy in Media www.aim.org


text: Kala Bhat, a slightly fragrant black rice from West Bengal, was initially used for the preparation of pulaos. Due to its fine taste and small yield, it has been reserved for special occasions. Black rice turns purple when boiled and is riddled with high concentrations of anthocyanins. Anthocyanins are phytochemicals present in deep blue and purple foods (like berries and aubergines) that are believed to combat chronic diseases such as cancer and heart disease. Regular consumption of this rice can help to detoxify the body, prevent diabetes, protect heart health, and lower cholesterol levels. Its fiber content is comparable to brown rice and has a moderate, nutty taste like brown rice.

domain: agronomy


Remember way back to season 5 of The Walking Dead? Beth (Emily Kinney) befriended a doctor at Grady Memorial Hospital named Dr. Steven Edwards. He is a highly intelligent man who sadly was also a coward, which is not a good trait in an apocalypse. Edwards and the others chose to stay at the hospital after their leader Dawn (Christine Woods), was killed. And in a 2020 interview with TWDs Greg Nicotero, he stated that the hospital survivors eventually died. Edwards was portrayed by Erik Jensen, who Deadline reports has now been cast in a Broadway production, The Collaboration.
The play did very well in London and will now see its American debut at Samuel J. Friedman Theatre. This Manhattan Theatre Club production will begin previews on November 29 ahead of its December 20 opening night. Jensen was announced with Krysta Rodriguez, and the pair will join previously announced Paul Bettany and Jeremy Pope.
The story tells of the artist collaboration of Andy Warhol (Bettany) and Jean-Michel Basquiat (Pope). Rodriguez has been cast as Maya, Basquiat’s girlfriend, and Jensen will play the art dealer and gallery owner who brings Warhol and Basquiat together, Bruno Bischofberger.
The Walking Dead – Erik Jensen
Jensen is well known for his roles in Mr. Robot, For Life, Mindhunter, The Americans, and many more.
Next, he will star in a thriller, Viral, with Sarah Silverman and Blair Underwood, who also serves as director for this independent film. Underwood plays Andrew, dealing with the disappearance of his wife. He meets Silverman’s Emilia, and they begin a romantic relationship. Both have their demons to deal with, and this story explores if they are strong enough to overcome their pasts and manage their mental illnesses to find happiness together. Jensen plays a character name, Liam.


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Vinter v United Kingdom  ECHR, Applications nos. 66069/09, 130/10 and 3896/10 (9 July 2013)
The Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights has held that the imposition of an irreducible sentence of life imprisonment breaches article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights.
The issue before the court was whether the imposition in the United Kingdom of life sentences without the possibility of parole breached article 3 of the Convention. Article 3 provides that “[n]o one shall be subjected to torture or to inhuman or degrading treatment of punishment”.
In England and Wales, the mandatory sentence for murder is life imprisonment. The trial judge must set a minimum term of imprisonment, after which the prisoner may apply to the Parole Board for release on licence. However, if the crime is exceptionally serious, the trial judge may make a “whole life order” pursuant to which the prisoner will never be released on parole. In such cases, the Secretary of State has a statutory discretion to release the prisoner if satisfied that “exceptional circumstances” exist which justify the prisoner's release on compassionate grounds. The Secretary of State's written policy is to exercise the discretion to release a prisoner only where the prisoner is terminally ill or seriously incapacitated.
The applicants in Vinter were three British nationals who had been given whole life sentences (either under the current law set out above or pursuant to certain transitional provisions) for committing murders which were considered to be especially heinous. The applicants submitted that their whole life orders, which afforded them no possibility of release except at the discretion of the Secretary of State in narrowly defined circumstances, breached article 3.
At first instance, the Fourth Section of the Court in a 4:3 decision found in favour of the United Kingdom on the basis that an irreducible life sentence (whether mandatory or discretionary) will only breach article 3 if the applicant's continued imprisonment can no longer be justified on any legitimate penological grounds. According to the majority at first instance, because imprisonment will almost always be justified at the time of the sentence of imprisonment being imposed, any breach of article 3 will not occur until some time after sentencing and, indeed, may never occur (if the prisoner's imprisonment continues to be justified for the whole of the prisoner's life). By contrast, the minority found that an irreducible life sentence will always breach article 3 and that, accordingly, a breach will occur when the sentence is imposed.
On appeal the Grand Chamber, by a majority of 16:1, agreed with the minority at first instance. The Grand Chamber found that article 3 of the Convention prohibits all irreducible life sentences and that, accordingly, a prisoner must have at least some possibility of being released. The Grand Chamber held that a prisoner's circumstances may change such that continued imprisonment is no longer justified, that a prisoner who is subject to an irreducible life sentence may not be able to atone for his or her crimes, and that it is incompatible with human dignity to deprive a person of their liberty “without at least providing him with the chance to someday regain that freedom”. In a separate concurring judgment, Judge Power-Forde found that article 3 encompasses “the right to hope”, finding that “[t]hose who commit the most abhorrent and egregious of acts and who inflict untold suffering upon others, nevertheless retain their fundamental humanity and carry within themselves the capacity to change”.
Having found that article 3 prohibits irreducible life sentences, the Grand Chamber found that the sentences imposed upon the applicants were in fact irreducible. The Grand Chamber noted that the relevant question is whether the prisoner has “any prospect of release” and that the imprisonment will be considered irreducible if, either at law or in fact, the sentence cannot be reduced. On the basis that different nations may legitimately seek to comply with their obligations under the Convention in different ways (the so-called “margin of appreciation”), the court found that article 3 does not require any particular form of review of life sentences (for example, review by a parole board). Nevertheless, the Court found that the discretionary review by the Secretary of State on “highly restrictive conditions” did not create a sufficient prospect of release to avoid a breach of article 3. In this regard, it is useful to compare the case with Kafkaris v Cyprus [GC], no. 21906/04 in which the Grand Chamber found that, although there was no provision for granting parole for any prisoners in Cypriot prisons (including those serving life sentences), the applicant's life sentence was not irreducible because the President of the Republic of Cyprus had a discretion (which had previously been exercised in other cases) to remit, suspend or commute any sentence or to order a prisoner's conditional release.
The question of whether the applicants should actually have been released was not at issue before the Grand Chamber, and so the finding that there was a violation of article 3 did not mean there was a prospect of their imminent release. That would turn on a separate question as to whether there were any grounds for their continued incarceration (e.g. dangerousness) in their individual cases.
It remains to be seen how the United Kingdom will respond to the Grand Chamber's decision in Vinter. In the meantime, the decision's potential relevance in Australia is a subject worthy of consideration.
Legislation in every state and territory in Australia permits (or, in certain circumstances, requires) courts to impose a sentence of life imprisonment without parole. The Grand Chamber's decision will be of particular relevance in Victoria and the Australian Capital Territory given that Victoria’s Charter of Human Rights and the Human Rights Act 2004 (ACT) each contain a provision in relevantly identical terms to article 3 of the Convention.
With respect to sentences of life imprisonment without parole in Victoria, the Victorian Court of Appeal noted in R v Coulston  2 VR 446 at 462 that “dreadful crimes … may require dreadful punishments” and that, accordingly, sentences of life imprisonment without parole should not be regarded as only appropriate in very rare cases. As at 2012, twelve prisoners in Victoria were serving sentences of life imprisonment without parole.
Regardless of the possible jurisprudential effect in Australia of the Grand Chamber's decision in Vinter, the decision is a reminder of the important balance in sentencing between, on one hand, ensuring the safety of the public and effectively deterring crime and, on the other hand, ensuring that prisoners are treated with a degree of dignity, are afforded an opportunity to rehabilitate and are not entirely bereft of hope.
This decision is available online at: http://hudoc.echr.coe.int/sites/eng/pages/search.aspx?i=001-122664
Edmund Robinson is a Lawyer at Allens.

domain: law


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In the Fathered by God Small Group Video Series, John Eldredge presents the six stages a man goes through as he matures in life and faith, sharing insights and teaching on how each stage can be encouraged and supported by those around him.
This companion participants guide follows the DVD episodes, providing additional information and discussion questions designed to help your small group grow and bond with each other. Together you will forge companionship with God the Father while undergoing a transformation, releasing the fullness of life and the passion God designed you to live.
John Eldredge is a bestselling author, a counselor, and a teacher. He is also president of Ransomed Heart, a ministry devoted to helping people discover the heart of God, recover their own hearts in Gods love, and learn to live in Gods kingdom. John and his wife, Stasi, live near Colorado Springs, Colorado.
LaurierEdmonton AlbertaAge: 55-65Gender: male5 Stars Out Of 5May 11, 2013LaurierEdmonton AlbertaAge: 55-65Gender: maleQuality: 5Value: 5Meets Expectations: 5This has been very helpful to me individually, I have shared thi book with many other guys, and based a retreat on thia materiel, the guys loved it
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It's not just witchfull thinking! Devil's Night at Museum London is back, so scare up a costume and join London's best-dressed gallery-goers for live music, DJ's, pop-up art projects, and other devilish delights, including a... Read More
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Congratulations to Janell Phelps for publishing her parents’ life story, Joy in Our Journey!
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I first got to know Mary Ruth Hammond when I read her sensitive and compelling From the Heart columns in the Transcript Bulletin. When she “retired” from doing that, I would see her sometimes in Grantsville. I loved talking to her as we had a lot in common, including a […]
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More a remake than a sequel, and not a very good remake, even by early 90’s sci-fi b-movie standards. You get the rehashed plot with more underhanded business dealings and less alligator action. Any of the interesting plotting in Alligator is abandoned along the way. We do get Richard Lynch, Dee Wallace, Steve Railsback, and Kane Hodder, which is nice. It’s not the worst film any of them made (Nukie is an impossible bar to surpass for Railsback), but it…
“And you will face the Sea of Darkness, and all therein that may be explored...”
This is the bar by which all other Italian horror are measured. The gore is beyond excessive. There’s some delightfully violent moments, like the execution of the warlock. If that’s all the movie offered though, this would probably be a three-star effort.
But it’s so much more. The cinematography is gorgeously foggy and dark, and that score is one of the finest out of Italy.…


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BY JOSH TOWNER
The Multiple Listing Service of Long Island Inc., MLS a system used by real estate brokers and buyers across Queens, and the Hudson Gateway Multiple Listing Service have merged to form New York MLS, LLC.
The new service will be made up of about 40,000 real estate professionals and will serve Bronx, Brooklyn, Nassau, Orange Counties, Putnam, Queens, Rockland, Suffolk, Sullivan and Westchester.
Queens residents will have access to an expanded and improved listing service once the merger has been completed and the new website is launched.
By forming one company and expanding geographic boundaries, data will flow more easily between brokers and agents in the coverage area, translating to more access to a larger audience of consumers, said Joseph Mottola, CEO of MLSLI.
Jim Speer will serve as chief executive officer for the new MLS after working for 30 years as the senior vice president of operations for MLSLI.
“With the alliance of two successful MLSs, members gain entry to a vast selection of integrated technology tools and resources which will better serve their buyers and sellers,” Speer said.
The new regional MLS has not been named yet, but is expected to be fully operational in 2019.


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Conn. man charged in Putnam Lake bank robberies
PATTERSON – A Connecticut man has been charged in connection with a pair of robberies and a robbery attempt at a Putnam Lake bank, officials said.
Michael J. McTighe, of New Fairfield, Conn., was extradited Wednesday from his home state to New York, where he was charged with two counts of third-degree robbery and one count of third-degree attempted robbery, felonies, police said.
McTighe, who was arrested after a joint investigation between state police and the Putnam County Sheriff's Office, is accused of robbing the Putnam County National Bank on Dec. 20 and again on Jan. 2.
During each incident, he walked into the bank at 89 Haviland Drive wearing a mask. Without showing any weapon, he demanded that everyone get onto the floor before taking an unspecified amount of cash and leaving. McTighe also is accused of an attempted robbery at the same bank on Jan. 21.
After the robberies, authorities said they were reviewing surveillance video from inside and outside the bank and had identified the robber's escape vehicle as a beat-up white car with orange New York plates. The robber also fled toward Connecticut after the robberies.
Police offered few details of their investigation Wednesday, instead focusing on the joint police work between the two agencies.
"The arrest is the culmination of the outstanding cooperation, steadfast perseverance, and effective capabilities of state police and sheriff's investigators in the case," Putnam Sheriff Donald Smith said in a statement.
McTighe, 46, was arraigned in Patterson Town Court, where Justice Anthony R. Mole set bail at $250,000 cash or $500,000 bond. He is to return to court on July 10.


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Typewriter Ex Libris Bookplate Gift Box
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Each of these beautifully illustrated bookplates features the phrase 'Ex Libris', meaning literally 'from the books of'. Add your name and paste to the inside cover of your favourite books to signify them as your own.
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We’re giving you access to a different kind of archive with our all-new creative escape on 4. A dedicated space for all-things music, fashion, art and design, The Nook invites you to kick back and explore, serving up a curated collection of vinyl, books and magazines. Your own personal hideout among the busy Soho streets.Look inside

domain: hobby


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Grand Chalet can accommodate to sleep up to 40 persons/kids. Also you can visit our Grand Chalet on (Hidden by Airbnb) with more details.
We build our vacation chalet in 2007 not too faraway from Seattle and far enough to feel in the wilderness and to have fun with our friends. Sauna, hot tub and more
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text: Better dead than Red? Not according to this four-disc set of Soviet propaganda films, an engrossing compilation of animated indoctrination spanning six decades of Russian history, from the October Revolution and the creation of the Soviet Union in the 1920s to the era of "perestroika" in the 1980s. These 41 films encourage good workers to sneer at the "American Imperialists" of the Cold War era; lampoon Hitler and other "Fascist Barbarians" who launched World War II; decry the "Capitalist Sharks" that make up the bourgeoisie; and look "Onward to the Shining Future: Communism." 6 hrs. total. Standard; Soundtrack: Russian; Soundtrack: English. In Russian with English subtitles.


Governments push a “big is best” mantra because it is easier for them to administer and potentially less costly. At the other extreme is the often under-resourced yet “small is beautiful” experience of many NGOs.
The proposed sale of the NSW Home Care Service to a single buyer is an example of “big is best” for government. The Aboriginal community is concerned about the implications for the clients of the Aboriginal Home Care Service which is included as part of the sale – see Not so Aboriginal Home Care? There are a number of issues: the profit motive may impact on the quality of service delivery for some of the most marginalised people in the state; there was no opportunity for the service to be split off and become Aboriginal run and controlled; and if the service delivery is sub-standard it may not respond to pressure from local elected representatives like a government service.
At the other extreme, In All things – great and small we look at the benefits of small organisations. In My choice matters Ellie Roberston discusses the benefit she has experienced by being able to manage her own care package. Both stories challenge the “big is best” mantra and invite us to look for the best outcomes for service users and communities. In The case for case management in the community we cover a different aspect – people with complex needs who need individual advocacy and case management in order to manage their disparate supports.
Urban renewal is another area where “big is best” is being rolled out as the global city. Citizens’ rights to the global city explores the relationship between a global city and its citizens who want a say in what happens. The Bays Precinct people’s campaign, has gone on the offensive listing out the principles that they want guiding any redevelopment by UrbanGrowth.
In Millers Point and the Rocks: An alternative way forward, consultants SGS found that mixed communities, that include public and affordable housing, deliver better economic outcomes than the proposed sale of public housing. In announcing The Friends of Millers Point formed we cover their initial campaigns to save Darling House and the Sirius building, which are targeted for sale in the governments public housing sell off.
Property development is happening all around us but how much do we actually know about it? An overview of property development provides an insight into what makes developers tick. In addition we also have an article on the hot button issue of Car parking and inner city planning.
In other articles we look at the NSW election boundary changes and at alcohol advertising in Alcohol in our community. One from the vault – Airport Battle acknowledges 40 years of campaigning around aircraft noise and a second airport for Sydney.
As we went to print the NSW Government released a discussion paper on social housing so we have given notice of a Community forum on the Social Housing in NSW Discussion Paper. You can find out more in Chris Martin’s Social Housing in NSW discussion paper… What is not up for discussion?
Charmaine Jones & Geoff Turnbull
Co-editors Inner Sydney Regional Council for Social Development


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Digitalisation in the health sector: Opportunities and stumbling blocks28-06-2023 Author: Jan Tissler
Comprehensive digitalisation of the healthcare system has been discussed for decades. The opportunities for AI-assisted research and diagnosis are currently increasing the pressure to innovate. However, many questions remain unanswered. Tangible results are only sporadic.
The digitalisation of health care in itself sounds like a good idea. It would make all examination results, diagnoses and treatments available at any time. It would allow doctors to better ensure that a newly prescribed medication for a patient is compatible with other treatments and illnesses. Changing doctors would become easier. Duplicate examinations due to lost documents could be avoided. And even those who have an accident or fall ill while on holiday would always have all their patient data with them – via a corresponding app on their smartphone.
Such perfect and seamless digitalisation would not only make life easier for doctors and patients but could also significantly accelerate medical research: Trends, effects and correlations could be identified from the data. This is especially true with regard to increasingly powerful AI tools: they are predestined to find patterns in enormous amounts of data. However, this data must first exist and be complete and suitable for analysis.
The discussion about the digitalisation of the health care system is far from new. It is now a good 20 years old. What has emerged from this discussion, however, differs greatly with regard to different countries.
Role models Estonia, Denmark and Finland
Estonia, for example, is considered a great role model in Europe. The Baltic state took up the topic as early as the 1990s and has consistently implemented it ever since. Not only health care but also administrative procedures and elections have been digitalised. Denmark and Finland are also considered pioneers in e-health. This map provides an overview of the state of affairs in selected European countries.
Switzerland has proclaimed the "Strategy eHealth Switzerland 2.0". The electronic patient dossier (EPD) is the main focus here. The website states: "For the Confederation and the cantons, digitalisation is a central instrument for achieving important health policy goals, namely in the areas of treatment quality, patient safety, efficiency, coordinated care and interprofessionalism as well as health literacy." The introduction of the EPD in Switzerland has been delayed but is now underway.
In Germany, the counterpart is the electronic patient record (ePA). Although it has been introduced, it is hardly noticed by the population: Not even one percent of the insured have used it so far. One reason is the complicated application process. The German government now wants to change from "opt-in" to "opt-out": in future, every citizen should have an ePA provided they do not actively object.
Not everyone agrees with this by a long shot. Fears about the security of one's own data and its use play a key role in the discussion.
Fears around data protection
These fears are not made up out of thin air. There is a reason why the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is particularly strict in its scrutiny of health-related information. At the same time, it stands in the way of plans for a "European Health Data Space" (EHDS) or at least makes its implementation more complicated. The idea behind EHDS is that just as services and goods can be exchanged as freely as possible within the EU, this should also be possible with health data.
But how can make sure this information doesn't fall into the wrong hands? Anonymising or pseudonymising the data are ways to increase the level of security. However, both options come with specific advantages and disadvantages. In the case of anonymisation, for example, data can no longer be viewed in the course of research, since it is not clear which information belongs to which person. Pseudonymisation makes this possible but is less secure.
Other questions revolve around who has access to which information and how much say patients should have.
E-health as a technological challenge
A digitalised health system is also an enormous technical challenge. After all, e-health only reveals its potential when information is seamlessly recorded and made available. This in turn only works if all relevant data routinely ends up in the system.
But even that isn't enough: the information must also be available in a meaningful format, ideally standardised. Were this not the case, it could only be used for research to a limited extent or not at all. "Of course, you can draw valid findings from everyday clinical practices from routine data that we don't get from laboratory experiments and controlled studies, but to do so, the database has to be clean," explains medical computer scientist Peter Haas in an interview with Heise.
Unstructured data would also make doctors' work more difficult since if worst comes to worst, they can't first read through several digitalised documents. They have to be able to recognise important information and contexts as quickly as possible.
So, there is still a lot to do in Switzerland, Germany and many other countries. Another driver of e-health in all of this is money. Digitalisation could save a lot of it. For Germany, for example, McKinsey estimates this figure at 42 billion euros per year. For Switzerland, the figure is 8.2 billion Swiss francs. In addition, research based on health data could lead to new and better medicines -–another market worth billions.

domain: health