6/25/2023 0 Comments Samantha irby essaysOkay, I’m exaggerating, but my point is FUCK THE CITY.īut, how does one make friends without an office to go to? Or a club to participate in? Or various PTA meetings to grimace at each other through? Are you just supposed to walk up to an interesting-looking person on the street and ask them to be your friend? I don’t know if this is some kind of reverse profiling, but I can usually glance at a person and know at first sight that we’re probably going to get along. I get to travel and work in fancy cities with mass transit and Ethiopian food, then come back and pay $1.87 for a gallon of gas for the car that I can park anywhere on my sprawling 2,000 acres of land that were practically free. When I moved to Kalamazoo from Chicago, I thought for sure that I was going to be happy staying at home and never going outside. Harder than listening to the dentist pry my tooth bone away from my jawbone while I lie there wide awake? Also yes! You don’t have to cry for me, but listen: trying to make new friends as an adult is the hardest thing I have ever attempted. Photo-Illustration: Preeti Kinha Photos: Getty Images
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6/25/2023 0 Comments Prodigal summer book reviewThe narrative follows Deanna, a solitary woman working as a park ranger Lusa, a recently widowed entomologist at odds with her late farmer husband's tight-knit family and Garnett, an old man who dreams of restoring the lineage of the extinct American Chestnut tree. Prodigal Summer tells the story of a small town in Appalachia during a single, humid summer, when three interweaving stories of love, loss and family unfold against the backdrop of the lush wildness of Virginia mountains. Heavily emphasizing ecological themes and her trademark interweaving plots, this novel tells three stories of love, loss and connections in rural Virginia. Prodigal Summer (2000) is the fifth novel by American author Barbara Kingsolver. Print (hardback & paperback) and audio-CD 6/25/2023 0 Comments Under the Dome by Stephen KingAgainst them stands Big Jim Rennie, a politician who will stop at nothing - even murder - to hold the reins of power, and his son, who is keeping a horrible secret in a dark pantry.īut their main adversary is the Dome itself. No one can fathom what this barrier is, where it came from, and when - or if - it will go away.ĭale Barbara, Iraq vet and now a short-order cook, finds himself teamed with a few intrepid citizens - town newspaper owner Julia Shumway, a physician's assistant at the hospital, a selectwoman, and three brave kids. Planes crash into it and fall from the sky in flaming wreckage, a gardener's hand is severed as "the Dome" comes down on it, people running errands in the neighboring town are divided from their families, and cars explode on impact. On an entirely normal, beautiful fall day in Chester's Mills, Maine, the town is inexplicably and suddenly sealed off from the rest of the world by an invisible force field. In Stephen King's mesmerizing new masterpiece - his biggest, most riveting novel since The Stand - a Maine town and its inhabitants are isolated from the world by an invisible, impenetrable dome.Ĭelebrated storyteller Stephen King returns to his roots in this tour de force, featuring more than 100 characters - some heroic, some diabolical - and a supernatural element as baffling and chilling as any he's ever conjured. 6/25/2023 0 Comments Girlology by Melisa HolmesThere are still some things you can try that make it easier to find and get out. This is most common if you accidentally forgot to take out a tampon before inserting a new one, or if you had sex without remembering to remove your tampon first (it’s not a good idea to have sex with a tampon in!). If you have a lost or stuck tampon, it’s not really stuck, it’s just high in your vagina and it may be squished sideways, making it hard to reach. Nothing can get above the cervix unless it’s liquid or microscopic in size! What if my tampon is stuck? The cervix is a barrier between the vagina and the uterus. This is one of the most common questions I hear from new tampon users! So let me just start with the good news: NOPE! A tampon CANNOT get lost in your body.Įven though your vagina connects your outside parts with the “inside” of your body, there’s basically a dead end at the top of the vagina - it’s called your cervix, and there’s no way a tampon can go past that. Melisa Holmes, OB-GYN, & Founder, Girlology Can a Tampon Get Lost in My Body? The variety of poetic forms and performance styles (sometimes elucidated on the CD, as well is in Giovanni’s introduction) makes this collection an excellent source of material not found together elsewhere. Listening to the CD completes the experience. All of the poems emphasize the beat and draw on African-American tradition they are richly and effectively illustrated by a corps of young illustrators whose biographical sketches are appended. Hope Anita Smith’s recitation of her “Audition” is quiet and hauntingly beautiful. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech is also included, both in the book and on the CD, with a performance in response by Giovanni and two of the advisory editors. There is a wealth of material, ranging from classic poems by Langston Hughes (several of them read by Hughes on the accompanying CD), Lucille Clifton, Eloise Greenfield, Maya Angelou, Walter Dean Myers, Jacqueline Woodson and others, to modern hip-hop and rap. The subtitle is more descriptive of the content of this engaging book than the title. The future can be so good that it's hard for any of us to imagine. Superintelligence, which he describes as an artificial intelligence that “greatly exceeds the cognitive performance of humans in virtually all domains of interest”, may be a lot closer than many realise, with AI experts and leading industry figures warning that it may be just a few years away. In his seminal work on artificial intelligence, titled Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, the Oxford University professor posits that AI may well destroy us if we are not sufficiently prepared. Its author, Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom, deliberately left it open-ended as he believes that humanity is currently in the egg hunting phase when it comes to superhuman AI. This tale, as its title suggests, does not have an ending. Despite warnings from members of their flock that they should first figure out how to tame an owl before they raise one, the sparrows devote all their efforts to capturing an egg. “How easy life would be,” they say, if the owl could work for them, and they could live a life of leisure. In the ‘Unfinished Fable of the Sparrows’, a group of small birds come up with a plan to capture an owl egg and raise the chick as their servant. A backlit owl egg almost ready to hatch (National Centre for Birds of Prey/ Screengrab) 6/24/2023 0 Comments B.P.R.D., Vol. 5 by Mike MignolaLaurence Campbell is a comic book artist, penciller, and inker. Arcudi was educated at Columbia University. Arcudi has more than 300 titles to his name, some of the most prominent being Abe Sapien, B.P.R.D., The Creep, Dark Horse Presents, and Predator. John Arcudi is a comic book writer and creator from Buffalo, New York. Mike lives in Southern California with his wife, daughter, and cat. Mike's books have earned numerous awards and are published in a great many countries. Along the way he worked on Francis Ford Coppola's film Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992), was a production designer for Disney's Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001), and was the visual consultant to director Guillermo del Toro on Blade II (2002), Hellboy (2004), and Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008). There are thirteen Hellboy graphic novels (with more on the way), several spin-off titles ( B.P.R.D., Lobster Johnson, Abe Sapien, and Sir Edward Grey: Witchfinder), prose books, animated films, and two live-action films starring Ron Perlman. In 1994, he published the first Hellboy series through Dark Horse. By the late 1980s, he had begun to develop his own unique graphic style, with mainstream projects like Cosmic Odyssey and Batman: Gotham by Gaslight. Starting in 1982 as a bad inker for Marvel Comics, he swiftly evolved into a not-so-bad artist. Mike Mignola's fascination with ghosts and monsters began at an early age reading Dracula at age twelve introduced him to Victorian literature and folklore, from which he has never recovered. To be honest, I tend to like art that almost seems to "disappear", if you will. No, it's put together with thought and care. All of it is here, and not tossed together in a salad, where the carrots get stuck all at the bottom of the bowl. This comic has all the fun you want in a Star Wars story AND a comic. And you will be pleased to hear that he came out on the "Lost Tribe of the Sith" side of awesome. So I had no clue what to expect with him and KOTOR. Bored stiff with "Knight Errant", both the novel and the comic. John Jackson Miller and I have had an up-down relationship. In later years, I've come back and tried them out, but really, a lot of Star Wars comics are meh to awful. (I have been remedying that by watching a fantastic Let's Play, hosted by a friend, and dayum, what fun!)Īnd as a Star Wars nerd, comics had never really been my thing. I think I'm probably one of the only self-proclaimed Star Wars nerds in existence who has never played the Knights of the Old Republic video game. I suppose I ought to toss my Star Wars nerd card out the window for my next statement. He ends up teaming up with a small-time scoundrel, Marn Hierogryph, and two junk yard dealers, Camper and Jarael, to flee. Zayne Carrick is by no stretch of the imagination a great Jedi Padawan but when he stumbles onto a startling scene, suddenly, he is wanted by the law and the Jedi Order. (No worries - Volume 2 is being shipped to my library!) We reserve the right to moderate at our own discretion. Social Media links & blogs (Twitter, Facebook Instagram, YouTube). 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6/23/2023 0 Comments The nameless city bookRat, on the other hand, is a homeless orphan who fends for herself. His father is a general, his mother is “tribe leader”. Kaidu is a young man who has just arrived in the The City to begin his training as a Dao soldier and to meet his father for the first time. Aside for the warning factions, there are also the citizens that live in The Nameless City. For the last 30 years the Dao have controlled the city, but it is a tenuous hold. There are three “tribes” of people who are constantly at war, and the main prize seems to be the City. The setting, like The Last Airbender, is what I can only describe as “vaguely Asian-ish”. I mention this because the style Hicks uses, in this first in a planned trilogy, evokes a similar feeling. Full disclosure, I am a big fan of Avatar: The Last Airbender cartoon, and I liked The Legend of Korra, especially the last season. Recently, I had the chance to read The Nameless City (2016) by Faith Erin Hicks. We are slowly coming out of it, but there are ramifications. Our house has had a visitation from some sort of vicious stomach virus from hell. |