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#Notable Deaths in March 2021
foxes-that-run · 4 months
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Love of My Life
LOML closes out Harry's House, it's a sad song about realising someone is the love of his life after he had lost them. Harry has spoken about an albums start and end, Harry's House starts with Sushi, imploring his muse to let love in and asking himself if just a taste of love is enough. LOML is about loss of that person and realisation that they were the love of his life. To Zane Lowe Harry said:
"Love of my life, I’ve always wanted to write a song about like home and loving England and all that kind of stuff. And it’s always kinda hard to do without being like ‘went to the chippy and I did this thing’ and to me Love of My Life was the most terrifying song for a long time because it is so bare, it's so sparse." He went on to say: "And in the spirit of what Harry's House is about, I think it started as an idea that was very literal, on the nose, [...] As I started making the album it wasn't about the geographical location it was much more of an internal thing."
So, what he said was that it is about his home and England is a metaphor. Home is common theme in Harry's work, most notably in Sweet Creature but even in 1D it has meant more than a place to him. The notebook also has a quote 'your mother is my home'. Taylor has also used home or homeland to refer to Harry, WomanExile has a great post on their usage of home as a metaphor for each other.
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The Lyric Video has roses, which Harry and Taylor Swift also use to refer to each other:
Since 1989, all rose and thorn lyrics are about Harry
Harry 's rose Tattoo is from 11 September 2013, when they started dating again after the VMAs.
Roses have been in videos, outfits, social media posts about each other, a list is here.
Timeline
In the NY ONO show Harry said he wrote it in Rob Stringers' (Sony CEO) house and that the phone ringing in it is his. As it Was was recorded in the same session, and in part, has a similar meaning. This places it in the first half of 2021. After the rest of the album, California. Also after Folk/evermore which are about communicating and endings respectively. Harry had seen Taylor in March at the 2021 Grammy's. At the time it was written Taylor was still dating Joe. Harry had been dating Olivia for a few months.
California in particular refers to 'summers death left to breathe' indicating that there may have been an ending of sorts in 2020 before he returned to England and drove to Italy over the time Folklore was released.
Though not lyrically addressed, to me LOML is a 'yes' to Question..?'s "Did you realize out of time, she was on your mind?" Question was written in the same time period, after the Grammy's interaction but was released 6 months later.
Tracklisting, release and length
Love of My Life is Harry's only track 13, Taylor's number. It was released on her birthday. It is 3:12 long, or March, 31 2012 - the date they met.
Live shows
Harry said to Zane Lowe he thought he would close the show with it. And he did up until March 25 2023 when it was replaced by Fine Line in the last leg. Later that same week Taylor Swift replaced Invisible String with The 1 and announced her split from Joe Alwyn. It only returned for the 3 Wembley shows.
It was missing for 30 shows and is one of the least played Harry’s House songs, only above Boyfriends and Grapejuice which was added for the last leg.
Lyrics
Baby, you were the love of my life, woah Maybe you don't know what's lost 'til you find it
The first verse is a turn on the phrase “you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone” he reconnected with his love and found she is the 1 but it is past tense, he still lost her. This is similar to the Clean secret message, which also appeared in the OOTW video “She lost him but she found herself and somehow that was everything.” And the cyclical nature of this relationship.
Take a walk on Sunday through the afternoon We can always find somethin' for us to do We don't really like what's on the news, but it's on all the time
The second verse to me is remembering good times with this person, when he felt at home, with shared experiences and comfort.
I take you with me every time I go away In a hotel, usin' someone else's name I remember back at Jonny's place, it's not the same anymore
To me, I take you with me everytime I go away refers to what Harry said about an internal feeling, no matter where he is in the world his love is ever-present even when they are not.
In the Dublin show on the 22nd June 2023 Harry confirmed this refers to his childhood friend is Jonathan Harvey. This speaks to Harry’s concept of home as the feeling that you are loved and belong. To me this reference is to when Harry took Taylor on a tour of his home in England, to the lakes, where he grew up and she may have met Jonny in 2012. She said that was her best birthday, sharing his home with her was important to him. To me, this line means their relationship is different now to it was then. As it was is also similar with with an external view of how others would see them and their place in life.
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It's unfortunate, ooh Just coordinates, ooh
It’s unfortunate, just coordinates sounds to me like he’s reflecting on how they got from the Lakes trip to their current state. This applies to his feelings about love and home. The impact touring has had on his life, what is home and his relationships.
I don't know you half as well as all my friends I won't pretend that I've been doin' everything I can To get to know your creases and your ends Are they the same?
Knowing his love is a theme, in Sunflower Harry sang “Let me inside, I wanna get to know you” and in Fine Line “Spreading you open Is the only way of knowing you” to explore the idea of intimacy co-existing with distance with the same person.
He also sings about not knowing his love in Trouble “And I don’t even know you / But I feel like I do sometimes”. Interestingly in If I could fly he feels like she knows him “Now you know me / for you eyes only”.
The “are they the same” speaks to once knowing all the creases and ends but not now. “Super Pretty” has a similar theme of distant intimacy and vulnerability “do you still feel the same about me”.
Baby, you were the love of my life, woah Maybe you don't know what's lost 'til you find it It's not what I wanted, to leave you behind Don't know where you'll land when you fly But, baby, you were the love of my life
The final chorus adds “don’t know where you’ll land when you fly” which confirms he is singing to a person not a country. Specifically a person with a private jet who can fly without the destination known. For that person every mystery take off is relentlessly tracked by an instagram account. How alienating it must be to someone who loves and wants her to see that and not know.
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doctorofmagic · 1 year
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First look at Doctor Strange v6 #1!
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Full interview:
Surprising no one, Dr. Stephen Strange is back from the dead, less than two years after he departed the mortal plane. March’s Doctor Strange #1 resurrects the Sorcerer Supreme for the latest chapter in writer Jed MacKay’s Strange saga, which began with 2021’s Death of Doctor Strange and continued in the Strange series, spotlighting Stephen’s widow, Clea. Artist Pasqual Ferry and colorist Matt Hollingsworth join MacKay for the new series, which focuses on Stephen and Clea’s marriage — and plenty of magical superhero life shenanigans.
Over the past year, MacKay has established Clea as the Sorcerer Supreme of both Earth and her native Dark Dimension, a dual role that makes her an especially formidable hero. Early in Strange, which concludes with this week’s issue #10, Clea declared herself the “Warlord of Manhattan,” and she’s been very aggressive in taking out mystical threats to her domain while searching for a way to resurrect her husband.
Now that Stephen is back, MacKay has the opportunity to delve deeper into their unique mystical marriage. “What I find interesting about Clea and Stephen’s relationship is that it has a pedigree that is up there with all the other great Marvel superhero partnerships,” said MacKay. “This is a relationship that extends way back into Marvel’s history, and I wanted to see that expressed on the page. These are two people who have known each other for a very long time, have suffered their ups and downs, and have come through them to find a new balance in their lives together.”
“I think there’s a certain gravitas in the two of them together — neither of them are young, fresh, unseasoned,” said MacKay. “Stephen Strange is an elder statesman in the Marvel universe, the person that’s always brought in when magic intrudes into lives of other heroes, and Clea is every bit his equal: an alien warlord who possesses great power of her own. I think Clea and Strange are a power couple in every sense of the word, and I’m interested in exploring that relationship and bringing it back to the forefront in the world of Strange.”
Their marriage is especially rife with storytelling potential because up until Stephen’s death, Clea had lost all memory of their relationship in one of those deals with the devil that Marvel heroes do every so often (see: Spider-Man’s “One More Day”). “[Stephen’s death] has brought them together after every power in the world conspired to keep them apart,” said MacKay. “In bringing Stephen back, our heroes have a fresh start. What remains is seeing how they use it.”
With a fresh start comes a new art team. Artist Pasqual Ferry has been working in superhero comics for over 25 years, drawing big-name characters like Superman, Iron Man, Thor, and the Fantastic Four. After taking a few years off from monthly comics, Ferry returned in 2021 with the Spider-Man: Spider’s Shadow miniseries, and there was a notable shift in his artwork. He began incorporating panel layouts evoking the grid-based abstract paintings of Piet Mondrian, giving the alternate-universe horror story its own distinct design sensibility.
With Spider’s Shadow, Ferry tackled one of the two heroes he’d been dreaming of drawing since he was a kid. Doctor Strange is the other one, and the new series is a passion project for the artist. “I have always liked magic, I have always liked the world of fantasy and anything that has to do with imagination,” said Ferry. “I’ve been intrigued by the designs by Steve Ditko, whom I admired for his work on Spider-Man. I always thought that the character of Doctor Strange gives artists a lot of potential to play with and imagine new things.”
“It’s the possibility, the challenge, the idea is to bring something new and wonderful to the table,” said Ferry. “There have been many great artists working on the character, from [Mike] Mignola, P. Craig Russell, Paul Smith. Great artists that have given us their version, and it is important that when Doctor Strange is in those worlds that we create an environment maximizing the use of panels and designs.”
“Pasqual is a marvel,” said MacKay. “He brings a seemingly effortless magic to these characters that sets them apart in the way those who live in the worlds of magic should be. He has an appetite for the weird and unearthly, and I can’t wait for people to see the strangeness he’s going to conjure!”
Ferry is also looking outside of superhero comics for artistic influences to maximize the book’s visual impact, from the nightmarish fantasy painting of Hieronymus Bosch to the surrealism of René Magritte and the mind-bending distortion of psychedelic art. He’s excited to translate these more abstract artistic concepts through a superhero whose aesthetic has been shaped by visionary comic book creators. Ferry’s frequent collaborator Matt Hollingsworth rounds out the art team, and his extreme versatility means that no matter what influence Ferry incorporates, the colors will match the style of the line work.
Stylistic contrast also plays a big part in how Doctor Strange’s and Clea’s specific types of magic are represented on the page. “I am going to try to differentiate Clea’s powers from those of Doctor Strange, making it clear that Stephen’s are fundamentally White Magic, while Clea’s come from the Dark Dimension, inherited from her parents, Umar and Orini,” said Ferry. “Aesthetically, while Strange’s spells will be bright, perhaps with an art deco touch in their shapes — I love P. Craig Russell’s designs — Clea’s will be darker in tone, more twisted, baroque, while remaining harmonious in shape. It could be said that Clea’s are more subtly threatening.”
That extra bit of menace ingrained in Clea’s personality will cause tension between the Spouses Supreme. Like any marriage, Stephen and Clea’s relationship has its own challenges, largely stemming from fundamental differences in their perspectives and how they engage with the world.
“We’ve seen in the past how Stephen’s background as a doctor is something that informs his every action,” said McKay, “while we’ve also more recently seen Clea carve her way through the arcane gangsters with little concern for bloodshed. How will these irreconcilable philosophies clash?”
[Source]
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whileiamdying · 8 months
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Tony Bennett, Jazzy Crooner of the American Songbook, Is Dead at 96
From his initial success at the Paramount in Times Square through his generation-spanning duets, his career was remarkable for both its longevity and its consistency.
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By Bruce Weber
July 21, 2023
Tony Bennett, a singer whose melodic clarity, jazz-influenced phrasing, audience-embracing persona and warm, deceptively simple interpretations of musical standards helped spread the American songbook around the world and won him generations of fans, died on Friday at his home of many decades in Manhattan. He was 96.
His publicist, Sylvia Weiner, announced his death.
Mr. Bennett learned he had Alzheimer’s disease in 2016, his wife, Susan Benedetto, told AARP The Magazine in February 2021. But he continued to perform and record despite his illness; his last public performance was in August 2021, when he appeared with Lady Gaga at Radio City Music Hall in a show titled “One Last Time.”
Mr. Bennett’s career of more than 70 years was remarkable not only for its longevity, but also for its consistency. In hundreds of concerts and club dates and more than 150 recordings, he devoted himself to preserving the classic American popular song, as written by Cole Porter, the Gershwins, Duke Ellington, Rodgers and Hammerstein and others.
From his initial success as a jazzy crooner who wowed audiences at the Paramount in Times Square in the early 1950s, through his late-in-life duets with younger singers gleaned from a range of genres and generations — most notably Lady Gaga, with whom he recorded albums in 2014 and 2021 and toured in 2015 — he was an active promoter of both songwriting and entertaining as timeless, noble pursuits.
Mr. Bennett stubbornly resisted record producers who urged gimmick songs on him, or, in the 1960s and early ’70s, who were sure that rock ’n’ roll had relegated the music he preferred to a dusty bin perused only by a dwindling population of the elderly and nostalgic.
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Instead, he followed in the musical path of the greatest American pop singers of the 20th century — Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby, Judy Garland, Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra — and carried the torch for them into the 21st. He reached the height of stardom in 1962 with a celebrated concert at Carnegie Hall and the release of his signature song, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.” And though he saw his popularity wane with the onset of rock and his career went through a trough in the 1970s, when professional difficulties were exacerbated by a failing marriage and drug problems, he was, in the end, more than vindicated in his musical judgment.
“I wanted to sing the great songs, songs that I felt really mattered to people,” he said in “The Good Life” (1998), an autobiography written with Will Friedwald.
It’s hard to overstate Mr. Bennett’s lasting appeal. He was still singing “San Francisco” — which led many people to think he was a native of that city, though he was actually a through-and-through New Yorker — more than half a century later. He sang on Ed Sullivan’s show and David Letterman’s. He sang with Rosemary Clooney when she was in her 20s, and Celine Dion when she was in her 20s.
He made his film debut in 1966, in a critically reviled Hollywood story, “The Oscar,” playing a man betrayed by an old friend. And though he did not pursue an acting career, decades later he was playing himself in movies like the Robert De Niro-Billy Crystal gangster comedy “Analyze This” and the Jim Carrey vehicle “Bruce Almighty.” He was 64 when he appeared as a cartoon version of himself on “The Simpsons.” He was 82 when he appeared on the HBO series “Entourage,” performing one of his trademark songs, “The Good Life.”
A lifelong liberal Democrat, Mr. Bennett participated in the Selma-to-Montgomery civil rights march in 1965, and, along with Harry Belafonte, Sammy Davis Jr. and others, performed at the Stars for Freedom rally on the City of St. Jude campus on the outskirts of Montgomery on March 24, the night before the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered the address that came to be known as the “How Long? Not Long” speech. At the conclusion of the march, Viola Liuzzo, a volunteer from Michigan, drove Mr. Bennett to the airport; she was murdered later that day by members of the Ku Klux Klan.
Mr. Bennett also performed for Nelson Mandela, then the president of South Africa, during his state visit to England in 1996. He sang at the White House for John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton, and at Buckingham Palace at Queen Elizabeth II’s 50th anniversary jubilee.
An ‘Elusive’ Voice
He won his first two Grammy Awards, for “San Francisco,” in 1963, and his last, for the album “Love for Sale,” with Lady Gaga, last year. Altogether there were 20 of them, including, in 2001, a lifetime achievement award. By some estimates, he sold more than 60 million records.
The talent that spawned this success and popularity was not so easy to define. Neither a fluid singer nor an especially powerful one, he did not have the mellifluous timbre of Crosby or the rakish swing of Sinatra. If Armstrong’s tone was distinctively gravelly, Mr. Bennett’s wasn’t quite; “sandy” was more like it. Almost no one denied that his voice was appealing, but critics strove mightily to describe it, and then to justify its appeal.
“The voice that is the basic tool of Mr. Bennett’s trade is small, thin and somewhat hoarse,” John S. Wilson wrote in The New York Times in 1962. “But he uses it shrewdly and with a skillful lack of pretension.”
In a 1974 profile, Whitney Balliett, the longtime jazz critic for The New Yorker, called Mr. Bennett “an elusive singer.”
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“He can be a belter who reaches rocking fortissimos,” Mr. Balliett wrote. “He drives a ballad as intensely and intimately as Sinatra. He can be a lilting, glancing jazz singer. He can be a low-key, searching supper-club performer.” But, he added, “Bennett’s voice binds all his vocal selves together.”
Most simply, perhaps, the composer and critic Alec Wilder said about Mr. Bennett’s voice, “There is a quality about it that lets you in.”
Indeed, what many listeners (including the critics) discovered about Mr. Bennett, and what they responded to, was something intangible: the care with which he treated both the song and the audience.
He had a storyteller’s grace with a lyric, a jazzman’s sureness with a melody, and in his finest performances he delivered them with a party giver’s welcome, a palpable and infectious affability. In his presentation, the songs he loved and sang — “Just in Time,” “The Best Is Yet to Come,” “Rags to Riches” and “I Wanna Be Around,” to name a handful of his emblematic hits — became engaging, life-embracing parables.
Frank Sinatra, whom Mr. Bennett counted as a mentor and friend, once put it another way.
“For my money, Tony Bennett is the best singer in the business,” he told Life magazine in 1965. “He excites me when I watch him. He moves me. He’s the singer who gets across what the composer has in mind, and probably a little more.”
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Mr. Bennett passed through life with as unscathed a public image as it is possible for a celebrity to have. Finding even mild criticism of him in reviews and interviews is no mean feat, and even his outspoken liberalism generally failed to attract vitriol from the right. (An exception was his call, after the drug-related deaths of Michael Jackson, Amy Winehouse and Whitney Houston, for the legalization of drugs, a view loudly denounced by William J. Bennett, the former drug czar, among others.)
With the possible exception of his former wives, everyone, it seemed, loved Tony Bennett. Skeptical journalists would occasionally try to pierce what they perceived as his perfect veneer, but they generally discovered that there wasn’t much to pierce.
“Bennett is outrageous,” Simon Hattenstone, a reporter for The Guardian, wrote in 2002. “He mythologizes himself, name-drops every time he opens his mouth, directs you to his altruism, is self-congratulatory to the point of indecency. He should be intolerable, but he’s one of the sweetest, most humble men I’ve ever met.”
Son of Queens
Anthony Dominick Benedetto was born on Aug. 3, 1926, in the Long Island City neighborhood of Queens, and grew up in that borough in working-class Astoria. His father, Giovanni, had emigrated from Calabria, in southern Italy, at age 11. His mother, Anna (Suraci) Benedetto, was born in New York in 1899, having made the sea journey from Italy in the womb. Their marriage was arranged. Giovanni and Anna were cousins; their mothers were sisters.
In New York, where Giovanni Benedetto became John, he was a grocer, but beleaguered by poor health and often unable to work. Anna was a factory seamstress and took in additional sewing to support the family. Anthony was their third child, their second son, and the first of any Benedetto to be born in a hospital. Giovanni, who sang Italian folk songs to his children — “My father inspired my love for music,” Mr. Bennett wrote in his autobiography — died when Anthony was 10.
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Anthony sang from an early age, and drew and painted, too. He would become a creditable painter as an adult, mostly landscapes and still lifes in watercolors and oils and portraits of musicians he admired, signing his paintings “Benedetto.” His first music teacher arranged for him to sing alongside Mayor Fiorello La Guardia at the opening of the Triborough Bridge (now the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge) in 1936.
For a time he attended the High School for Industrial Arts (now called the High School of Art and Design) in Manhattan, but he never graduated. He dropped out and found work as a copy boy for The Associated Press, in a laundry and as an elevator operator.
“I couldn’t figure out how to get the elevator to stop at the right place,” he recalled. “People ended up having to crawl out between floors.”
At night he performed at amateur shows and worked as a singing waiter. He had just begun to get paying work as a singer, using the stage name Joe Bari, when he was drafted.
He arrived in Europe toward the end of World War II, serving in Germany in the infantry. He spent time on the front lines, an experience he described as “a front-row seat in hell,” and was among the troops who arrived to liberate the prisoners at the Landsberg concentration camp, a subcamp of Dachau.
After Germany surrendered, Mr. Bennett was part of the occupying forces, assigned to special services, where he ended up as a singer with Army bands and for a time was featured in a ragtag version of the musical “On the Town” — directed by Arthur Penn, who would go on to direct “Bonnie and Clyde” and other notable movies — in the opera house in Wiesbaden.
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He returned to New York in August 1946 and set about beginning a career as a musician. On the G.I. Bill, he took classes at the American Theater Wing, which he later said helped teach him how to tell a story in song. He sang in nightclubs in Manhattan and Queens.
A series of breaks followed. He appeared on the radio show “Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts,” the “American Idol” of its day. (The competition was won by Rosemary Clooney.) There are different versions of the biggest break in Mr. Bennett’s early career, but as he told it in “The Good Life,” he had been singing occasionally at a club in Greenwich Village where the owner had offered Pearl Bailey a gig as the headliner; she agreed, but only on the condition that Joe Bari stayed on the bill.
When Bob Hope came down to take in Ms. Bailey’s act, he liked Joe Bari so much that he asked him to open for him at the Paramount Theater. Hope had a condition, however: He didn’t like the name Joe Bari, and insisted it be changed. Dismissing the name Anthony Benedetto as too long to fit on a marquee, Hope christened the young singer Tony Bennett.
The Hits Roll In
The producer Mitch Miller signed Mr. Bennett to Columbia Records in 1950; “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” was his first single. Miller was known for his hit-making prowess, a gift that often involved matching talented singers with novelty songs or having them cover hits by others, for which he was criticized by more serious music fans and sometimes by the singers themselves.
He and Mr. Bennett had a contentious relationship. Mr. Bennett resisted his attempts at gimmickry; Miller, who believed that the producer and not the singer was in charge of a recording, applied his authority. Still, together they achieved grand success.
By mid-1951, Mr. Bennett had his first No. 1 hit, “Because of You.” That same year, his version of the Hank Williams ballad “Cold, Cold Heart” also hit No. 1; three years after Williams died in 1953, Mr. Bennett performed it in his honor at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville.
Other trademark songs followed: “Rags to Riches” in 1953; “Stranger in Paradise,” from the Broadway show “Kismet,” also in 1953; Jule Styne, Betty Comden and Adolph Green’s “Just in Time,” from the show “Bells Are Ringing,” in 1956. That same year, Mr. Bennett was host of his own television variety show, a summer replacement for a similar show that starred another popular Italian American crooner, Perry Como. In 1958, he recorded two albums with the Count Basie band, introducing him to the jazz audience.
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In the 1950s, Mr. Bennett toured for the first time, played Las Vegas for the first time and got married for the first time, to Patricia Beech, a fan who had seen him perform in Cleveland. The marriage would flounder in the 1960s, overwhelmed by Mr. Bennett’s perpetual touring, but their two sons would end up playing roles in Mr. Bennett’s career: the older one, D’Andrea, known as Danny, became his father’s manager, and Daegal, known as Dae, became a music producer and recording engineer.
In July 1961, Mr. Bennett was performing in Hot Springs, Ark., and about to head to the West Coast when Ralph Sharon, his longtime pianist, played him a song written by George Cory and Douglass Cross that had been moldering in a drawer for two years. Mr. Sharon and Mr. Bennett decided that it would be perfect for their next date, at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, and it was.
They recorded the song — of course it was “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” — six months later, in January 1962. It won Mr. Bennett his first two Grammys, for best male solo performance and record of the year, and worldwide fame. In “The Good Life,” he wrote that he was often asked if he ever tired of singing it.
“I answer, ‘Do you ever get tired of making love?’” he wrote.
Just five months later, Mr. Bennett performed at Carnegie Hall with Mr. Sharon and a small orchestra. He got sensational reviews — though The Times’s was measured — and the recording of the concert is now considered a classic.
But as the 1960s proceeded and rock ’n’ roll became dominant, Mr. Bennett’s popularity began to slip. In 1969, he succumbed to the pressure of the new president of Columbia Records, Clive Davis, to record his versions of contemporary songs, and the result, “Tony Sings the Great Hits of Today!” — including the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby” and “Something” — was a musical calamity, a record that Mr. Bennett would later tell an interviewer made him vomit.
His relationship with Columbia soured further and finally ended, and by the middle of the 1970s Mr. Bennett had formed his own company, Improv Records, on which he recorded the first of two of his most critically admired albums, duets with the jazz pianist Bill Evans. (The second one was released on Evans’s label, Fantasy.) Together the two opened the Newport Jazz Festival, which had moved to New York, at Carnegie Hall in 1976.
Improv went out of business in 1977, and without a recording contract Mr. Bennett relied more and more on Las Vegas, then in decline, for regular work. His mother died that year, and the profligate life he had been living in Beverly Hills caught up with him; the Internal Revenue Service was threatening to take his house. His second marriage, a tumultuous one to the actress Sandra Grant, collapsed — she would later say that she would have been better off if she had married her previous boyfriend, Joe DiMaggio — and he had begun using marijuana and cocaine heavily.
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One day in 1979, high and in a panic, he took a bath to calm down and nearly died in the tub. In later years he would play down the seriousness of the event, but he wrote about it in “The Good Life,” describing what he called a near-death experience: “A golden light enveloped me in a warm glow. It was quite peaceful; in fact, I had the sense that I was about to embark on a very compelling journey. But suddenly I was jolted out of the vision. The tub was overflowing and Sandra was standing above me. She’d heard the water running for too long, and when she came in I wasn’t breathing. She pounded on my chest and literally brought me back to life.”
Mr. Bennett turned to his older son for help. Danny Bennett took over the management of his career, aiming to have the American musical standards that were his strength, and his handling of them, perceived as hip by a new generation.
Somewhat surprisingly, the strategy took hold. An article in Spin magazine, which was founded in 1985, declared Mr. Bennett and James Brown as the two foremost influences on rock ’n’ roll, and the magazine followed up with a long, admiring profile.
A Career Revival
Encouraged by executive changes at Columbia Records, Mr. Bennett returned to the Columbia fold in 1985. The next year he released the album “The Art of Excellence.” WBCN in Boston became the first rock station to give it regular airplay. Released in the emerging CD format, it spurred the sales of Mr. Bennett’s back catalog as music fans began replacing their vinyl records with CDs.
In 1993, Mr. Bennett was a presenter, along with two members of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, at MTV’s Video Music Awards. The next year he gave an hourlong performance for MTV’s “Unplugged” series, which included duets with K.D. Lang (with whom he would later tour) and Elvis Costello. The recording of the show won the Grammy for album of the year.
The revival of Mr. Bennett’s career was complete. Not only had he returned to the kind of popularity he had enjoyed 40 years earlier, but he had also been accepted by an entirely new audience.
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He recorded albums that honored musicians he admired — Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra and Billie Holiday — and he collaborated on standards with singers half, or less than half, his age. On the 2006 album “Duets: An American Classic,” he sang “If I Ruled the World” with Ms. Dion, “Smile” with Barbra Streisand and “For Once in My Life” with Stevie Wonder, and revisited his first Columbia single, “Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” with Sting. Five years later, on “Duets II,” his collaborators included Aretha Franklin, Queen Latifah, Willie Nelson and Ms. Winehouse.
As the century changed, he was once again touring, giving up to 200 performances a year, and recording prolifically.
In 2007 Mr. Bennett married a third time, to his longtime companion, Susan Crow, a teacher four decades his junior whom he had met in the late 1980s. Together they started a foundation, Exploring the Arts, that supports arts education in schools, and financed the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts, a public high school in Queens.
Mr. Bennett had lived in the same Manhattan apartment, where he died, for most of his adult life, except for a few years in Los Angeles and London, Ms. Weiner, his publicist, said. He is survived by his wife; his sons, Danny and Dae; his daughters, Johanna and Antonia Bennett; and 9 grandchildren.
If there was a magical quality to Mr. Bennett’s life, as suggested by David Evanier in a glowing 2011 biography, “All the Things You Are: The Life of Tony Bennett,” it is encapsulated by a story Mr. Bennett told to Whitney Balliett in 1974.
“I like the funny things in life that could only happen to me now,” he said. “Once, when I was singing Kurt Weill’s ‘Lost in the Stars’ in the Hollywood Bowl with Basie’s band and Buddy Rich on drums, a shooting star went falling through the sky right over my head and everyone was talking about it, and the next morning the phone rang and it was Ray Charles, who I’d never met, calling from New York. He said, ‘Hey, Tony, how’d you do that, man?’ and hung up.”
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Hello everyone!!!
Wow… it’s been a hot minute since I made a post.Today I just wanted to talk about a new movie that I saw on Netflix the other day. The Life and Death of Marsha P Johnson.  I thought it was great and wanted to share it with more people. 
If you don’t know who she is then let me give you some backstory, Marsha P Johnson. According to the article “Remembering Marsha P. Johnson” by The Peak, a student newspaper for the Simon Fraser University, she was a gay and trans rights activist, most notably remembered for her involvement in the Stonewall riots of 1969. She along with another trans woman Sylvia Rivera headed trans rights activism despite their many struggles. Together they created the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) to help homeless trans youth. Though it is important to remember, Marsha was a Black trans woman and that put a major target on her back. The article On Marsha P. Johnson’s Birthday, Remembering her True Legacy highlights her black identity and how even today it is Black trans youth that face more violence than any other trans youth. 
But Marsha should not be remembered for her struggles, her work is amazing! Most articles and news sources, except the transphobic and homophobic ones, remember her as an icon. In fact, the article by The Peak even highlights the time she and Rivera marched in front of the 1973 pride parade after being banned from marching in it. THAT is icon behavior. 
The main focus of this documentary was not Johnson’s work, it was her death. In 1992 she was found dead in the Hudson River and police ruled in a suicide without any further investigation. This is in spite of the fact that many of her friends thought it was foul play and reported seeing an injury on the back of her head. The documentary follows Victoria Cruz as she tries to uncover the real reason behind her friend Marsha’s death. 
Though very little is discovered, this film is bringing up old conversations. The article Stonewall uprising: 50 years later—Emerging challenges for LGBTQ communities around the world brings up how trans identities are not researched as well as other queer identities. Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera started the conversation and it is up to us to continue it. One point the paper brings up is “In contrast, a more strongly developed gender identity was related to greater gender identity discrimination and less inclusion in the community.” (Arcidiacono and Carbone 641). This just further emphasizes how trans identities are excluded. Though, Johnson’s and Rivera’s STAR house is a testament of how community is the most integral part of living your true self. This is something highlighted in The Afterward: Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson in the Medieval Imaginary by Joy Ellison and Nicholas Hoffman who wrote about the accomplishments of the two women. 
Overall, the movie provides a good entry point to learning about the life of Marsha P. Johnson. While it does focus on the investigation of her death, there are flashbacks to her work and involvement in activism. It is a reminder that even though her life was cut short, she helped millions of people around 
References
Arcidiacono, & Carbone, A. (2021). Stonewall uprising: 50 years later—Emerging challenges for LGBTQ communities around the world. Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology, 31(6), 639–643. https://doi.org/10.1002/casp.2584
Baska, M., & Fink, L. (2022, August 24). On Marsha P Johnson's birthday, remember her true legacy of Black trans joy in resistance. PinkNews. Retrieved April 22, 2023, from https://www.thepinknews.com/2022/08/24/marsha-p-johnson-activism-birthday-institute/
Ellison, & Hoffman, N. (2019). The Afterward: Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson in the Medieval Imaginary. Medieval Feminist Forum, 55(1), 267–294. https://doi.org/10.17077/1536-8742.2140
Icart, C., & Young, W. (2022, November 15). Remembering Marsha P. Johnson. The Peak. Retrieved April 22, 2023, from https://the-peak.ca/2022/11/remembering-marsha-p-johnson/
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mariacallous · 1 year
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Another mysterious death among Russian top executives last week drew further attention to the ever-increasing number of suspicious demises among the oligarchs and critics of President Vladimir Putin, raising questions on whether they have become all too common to be completely coincidental.
Ivan Pechorin, a top manager at the Corporation for the Development of the Far East and the Arctic, was found dead in Vladivostok after allegedly falling off his luxury yacht and drowning near Cape Ignatyev in the Sea of Japan two days before, according to the local administration.
"On September 12, 2022, it became known about the tragic death of our colleague, Ivan Pechorin, Managing Director for the Aviation Industry of the Corporation for the Development of the Far East and the Arctic," a statement from the company said.
Pechorin is said to have been tasked with modernising Russia's aviation industry and worked directly under Putin.
Earlier this year, the company’s 43-year-old general director Igor Nosov also died from a reported stroke after taking over the reins in May 2021.
Meanwhile, another aviation expert died under strange circumstances: the former head of the Moscow Aviation Institute Anatoly Gerashchenko was pronounced dead after falling down "several sets of stairs" on Wednesday, according to a statement issued by the institute.
Geraschenko led the institute -- which closely collaborates with the Russian Ministry of Defence and has aided the development of the likes of MiG fighter jets -- until 2015, but it is believed to have remained in an advisory role since.
The Russian aviation industry has long been suspected of having direct ties with espionage.
In 2018, former deputy director of the Russian national air carrier Aeroflot Nikolai Glushkov -- who famously claimed that about one-fourth of the company's employees were officers of one of the branches of the country's intelligence -- was found hanged in his home in New Malden, London.
Glushkov was a notable Kremlin critic and a close friend of the late oligarch Boris Berezovsky, who was also found dead with a ligature around his neck in 2013. 
Glushkov's death also occurred right after the novichok poisoning of former GRU spy and double agent Alexei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury, prompting the investigators to label it as suspicious.
The results of an inquest finalised in April 2021 showed that Glushkov was unlawfully killed, with his death made to look like a suicide by hanging.
'Tripped and fell while smoking'
The news of Pechorin's death came less than two weeks after the chairman of the board of Russia's largest private oil company, Ravil Maganov, died in what Russian news agencies cited as an accidental fall from a hospital window. 
Initially, a statement by his company Lukoil said Maganov “passed away after a severe illness” on 1 September but did not give further details.
Russian news reports later stated his body was found on the grounds of Moscow's Central Clinical Hospital, where Russia's political and business elite are often treated. 
Maganov appeared to have fallen from a sixth-story window, the reports said. Some sources claimed he tripped and fell while smoking, stating a pack of cigarettes was found by the window. The news site RBK also said police were investigating the possibility of suicide.
Lukoil was one of a few Russian companies to publicly call for an end to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, calling in March for the “immediate cessation of the armed conflict”.
Incidentally, Maganov was not the first Lukoil official to die under suspicious circumstances since Kremlin's full-scale aggression against its western neighbour began in late February.
A former top manager Aleksandr Subbotin was found dead in the basement of a residence in a Moscow suburb in May. 
Russian news reports said the house belonged to a self-styled healer, Shaman Magua, who practised purification rites. 
Magua testified that Subbotin came to his house under the influence of alcohol and drugs and demanded that the healer, whose real name is Aleksei Pindurin, performs a healing ritual for hangover symptoms.
Investigators said the preliminary cause of Subbotin's death was determined to be heart failure.
Yet, it is Ravil Maganov's demise that caught the attention of the press, having been the most well-publicised in a string of accidental self-defenestrations and other suspicious deaths of those who either profited from good relations with Putin or were a thorn in his side -- or both.
Anti-war oligarchs die under strange circumstances
At least another eight Russian oligarchs have died in strange circumstances almost since the outbreak of the conflict in Ukraine. All had in common close links to the Kremlin, immense wealth, a connection to Russian gas and an anti-war stance on Ukraine.
This has raised the suspicions of international investigators, who are beginning to believe that these deaths may, in fact, have been staged suicides or assassinations due to their stance on the Kremlin's aggression against Ukraine or their links to corruption in the Russian gas company Gazprom.
It all started in St Petersburg in the run-up to the war. 
Only a month before the outbreak of the conflict in Ukraine, a top executive of the gas company Gazprom was found dead in his cottage near St Petersburg. 
Leonid Shulman, 60, was found in the bathroom of the house with slashed wrists, local news reported, citing a source.
According to the police authorities, a suicide note was allegedly found next to his body, in which he recounted his suffering after a leg injury -- which Gazprom claimed caused him to take a leave of absence. 
The version has been questioned after the Warsaw Institue think tank stated that Shulman, who was the head of the transport service at Gazprom Invest, was involved in a possible corruption case at the Russian gas giant.
The morning after Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February, Alexander Tyulyakov, 65, a senior executive of Gazproms's Corporate Security, died at his home in the same village as Shulman. According to the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta, his body was found hanged in the garage.
The same newspaper quoted an unnamed law enforcement source as saying that Gazprom's own security unit arrived at the scene of the suicide at the same time as the police and was also investigating the death.
One of two deaths that have taken place abroad is that of Mikhail Watford, who lived with his family in the UK. On 28 February, the Ukrainian-born 66-year-old oil and gas magnate, who also built a property empire in London, was found dead at his home in Surrey.
Watford's cause of death was determined as death by hanging, but his wife and children, who were at home at the time, were unharmed. UK authorities were treating Watford's death as unexplained but not suspicious. 
It later emerged that Watford, commonly referred to as Misha, had changed his surname from Tolstosheya after moving to the UK in early 2000. 
Murder-suicides escalate suddenly among Putin-friendly oligarchs?
In March, the bodies of Russian billionaire Vasily Melnikov and his family were found in his luxury flat in Nizhny Novgorod, a city in western Russia. 
Melnikov had made his fortune working for one of the medical companies affected by Western sanctions.
According to the Russian newspaper Kommersant, Melnikov, along with his 41-year-old wife and two young children, aged 10 and 4 respectively, died of stab wounds. The murder weapon was allegedly found at the scene of the crime.
The newspaper reported that the oligarch had killed his family before committing suicide, although neighbours and other relatives disagreed with the official version.
Other media have claimed that Melnikov's company, which imports medical equipment to Russia, was on the verge of bankruptcy due to Western sanctions imposed in retaliation for the war in Ukraine.
The latest case has taken place in Spain, more specifically in Lloret de Mar, where Russian oligarch Sergei Protosenya, 55, was found dead along with two other family members on 19 April.
The former head of the gas giant Novatek, with a personal worth of €400 million, was found hanged, along with those of his wife and daughter, who were stabbed to death in the family villa.
What was initially classified by the police as a double homicide followed by Protosenya's suicide was later categorically denied by his son.
Several family friends have also come out in public to state that Protosenya is, in fact, the third victim of a "staged suicide" and that the oligarch would have been incapable of murdering his family.
The Catalan police are still actively investigating the case.
Just a day before the death of Protosenya and his family, the body of Russian oligarch Vladislav Avayev was found in his Moscow flat, along with the bodies of his wife and 13-year-old daughter. His daughter Anastasia, 26, was the one who discovered the crime scene.
Russian state-owned news agency TASS quoted a source close to law enforcement as saying that preliminary evidence pointed to Avayev -- former advisor to Putin and former vice-president of Gazprombank -- killing his wife and daughter and then committing suicide.
A pistol was found in the oligarch's hand, and the flat was locked from the inside.
Gazprombank is Russia's third-largest bank and is associated with Gazprom, the world's largest publicly traded natural gas company. 
Avayev was not the last Gazprom top-level manager to die under strange circumstances, however. 
On 2 May, Andrei Krukovsky, the 37-year-old director of a Sochi ski resort owned by the gas giant, died after allegedly falling off a cliff while hiking near the Achipse fortress, the scenic area's landmark monument.
“The general manager of the Krasnaya Polyana resort, Andrei Alekseevich Krukovsky, tragically passed away. He loved the mountains and found peace there,” TASS news agency reported.
The Krasnaya Polyana is one of the most popular ski venues in Russia and was a part of the Olympic complex during the 2014 Sochi Winter Games.
And on 4 July, multi-millionaire businessman Yuri Voronov was found in the swimming pool at his home in the affluent Vyborgsky neighbourhood of St Petersburg with a gunshot wound to his head.
The police retrieved a handgun at the scene, while bullet casings were found at the bottom of the pool, local media reported.
The 61-year-old Voronov, whose death was deemed to have been a suicide, was the CEO of Astra-Shipping transport and logistics company, a subcontractor to Gazprom with lucrative contracts tied to its operations in the Arctic.
Self-defenestrations the most suspicious
Maganov's death on Thursday also follows the pattern of prominent Russians falling out of windows to their deaths.
In October 2021, a Russian diplomat was found dead after he fell from a window of the Russian embassy in Berlin, Der Spiegel reported.
The unidentified man was a second secretary at the embassy, but German intelligence sources told the newspaper they suspected he was an undercover officer with Russia's FSB.
Investigative outlet Bellingcat said it used open-source data to identify the man as Kirill Zhalo, the son of General Alexey Zhalo, deputy director of the FSB's Second Service, responsible for dealing with internal political threats for the Kremlin.
In December of the same year, the founder of nationalist blog Sputnik and Pogrom Yegor Prosvirnin died after falling out of a window of a Moscow apartment building. 
Prosvirnin's naked body was found next to a knife and a gas canister after shouts and yelling were heard from his apartment, local media reported. 
Prosvirnin, a right-wing activist, originally supported Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014 but later became a vocal critic of Putin, predicting a civil war in Russia and the collapse of the Russian Federation.
And on 14 August, Dan Rapoport, Latvian-American investment banker and outspoken Putin critic who had just left Ukraine after the Russian invasion, was found dead in front of a luxury apartment building in Washington DC.
Police say they were not treating Rapoport's death as suspicious, the Washington-based Politico reported, but the case remains under investigation.
Rapoport became rich while in Moscow before falling out of favour with the Kremlin, mostly due to his support for the opposition leader Alexei Navalny, according to reports.
In 2017, Rapoport's then-business partner, Sergei Tkachenko, also fell to his death from his Moscow apartment's window.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, at least four health care workers have fallen out of windows in Russia, with only one surviving despite grave injuries.
At least three incidents of doctors self-defenestrating from hospital windows took place over a two-week period between April and May 2020, with media reports claiming they had protested working conditions during the worst wave of infections in the country prior to the incidents.
In December 2020, a top Russian scientist developing a novel COVID-19 vaccine, Alexander Kagansky, was found dead after falling from his high-rise apartment in St Petersburg.
According to Russian outlets, police claimed Kagansky stabbed himself and then jumped to his death.
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New article: "The Good Nurse’ Netflix Movie: Everything We Know So Far"
Chilling Netflix serial killer biopic 'The Good Nurse' is coming to Netflix in October 2022. by Tigran Asatryan for "What's on Netflix", Published on August 31st, 2022.
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"In 2021 Netflix went on a spending spree at the Berlin European Film Market, and one of the biggest acquisitions made by the streamer was its $25 million deal for the global streaming rights to The Good Nurse. Starring Jessica Chastain and Eddie Redmayne, The Good Nurse is coming to Netflix in October 2022. Here’s what you need to know.
BAFTA-nominated Danish writer-director Tobias Lindholm known for his work on Borgen, Mindhunter and The Hunt is directing the movie with a script written by Krysty Wilson-Cairns, who was nominated for an Oscar for her screenplay on war drama 1917.
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Darren Aronofsky’s Protozoa has produced the movie along with FilmNation. The movie was set up earlier with Lionsgate before it landed in the open market at the EFM. Deadline was the first to report Netflix’s intention to move forward with buying the movie.
When will The Good Nurse release on Netflix?
The Good Nurse has been in post-production since June 2021, and finally, it’s been announced that it will be released on Netflix worldwide on Wednesday, October 26th, 2022.
The film will also be available in select theatres a week before its Netflix release on October 19th, 2022.
We first saw The Good Nurse in the Netflix 2022 movie preview. It’s currently expected to land on Netflix in the Fall 2022 movie lineup.
You can see it below between 1:45 and 1:46 (yes, only a second).
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The result of that single second of footage is two screenshots featuring Jessica Chastain and Eddie Redmayne.
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What is the plot of The Good Nurse and who is Charles Cullen?
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Netflix’s The Good Nurse will tell the true story of the pursuit and capture of Charles Cullen, one of the most prolific serial killers in history who is suspected of murdering up to 400 patients during his 16-year career as a nurse, earning him the title “The Angel of Death”. Cullen was a married father who was thought to be a responsible caretaker before he was implicated for the deaths of as many as 300 patients over 16 years, spread across 9 hospitals in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
The movie will be adapted from Charles Graeber’s 2013 chronicle book of these events called The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder.
Here’s the Netflix description for the upcoming movie:
"Suspicious that her colleague is responsible for a series of mysterious patient deaths, a nurse risks her own life to uncover the truth in this gripping thriller based on true events.”
Who is cast in The Good Nurse?
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Netflix’s The Good Nurse will be led by Oscar-winner Eddie Redmayne who is known for his roles in such movies as Fantastic Beasts, The Danish Girl, Les Miserables, and more. Notably, Redmayne is among the cast of the multi-Oscar nominated Netflix Original movie, The Trial of the Chicago 7. Redmayne will play Charlie Cullen, who was caught by two former Newark homicide detectives who would not let go, aided by a nurse
Alongside Redmayne will be Oscar-nominee Jessica Chastain (Zero Dark Thirty, Molly’s Game, Interstellar) who will portray the nurse who worked alongside Cullen and risked her job and family’s safety to stop him and end the killing spree.
Nnamdi Asomugha is the third star to be attached to the title in late March 2021. Asomugha’s credits include When the Streetlights Go On, Crown Heights, and Sylvie’s Love. Later, in April 2021 Noah Emmerich (The Americans, Space Force) and Kim Dickens (Deadwood, Fear the Walking Dead) were also announced to appear in The Good Nurse.
What’s the production status on The Good Nurse?
The Good Nurse began production on April 21st, 2021 in the town of Stamford, Connecticut, US according to issue 1240 of Production Weekly. Filming wrapped on the production by on June 24th, 2021.
First pictures were spotted of Redmayne and Chastain on set via ETCanada.
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Further pictures were released by a Jessica Chastain fan account on Twitter, with even more pictures available on their website.
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The movie has been given an R rating by the MPAA in the United States and a 15 by the BBFC in the United Kingdom. The Good Nurse has a runtime of 2 hours".-
Photos by Netflix and Getty Images
Source:
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ladynoirist · 1 year
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I posted 5,448 times in 2022
That's 4,713 more posts than 2021!
207 posts created (4%)
5,241 posts reblogged (96%)
Blogs I reblogged the most:
@chatonnoir
@nothing-particularly-exciting
@gentil-minou
@ladyofthenoodle
@passionfruitbowls
I tagged 2,836 of my posts in 2022
Only 48% of my posts had no tags
#ml spoilers - 241 posts
#adrien agreste - 216 posts
#ladynoir - 204 posts
#spy x family - 175 posts
#lisays - 173 posts
#ml season 4 - 129 posts
#chat noir - 96 posts
#ml season 5 - 92 posts
#spy x family manga - 91 posts
#love square - 75 posts
Longest Tag: 140 characters
#they sent the showrunner death threats over their ship which was very blatantly meant to be a rebound and nothing else and lasted maybe 3 ep
My Top Posts in 2022:
#5
it's a straight up miracle that ml is a coherent and enjoyable show despite jeremy zag doing his level best to literally blow it up to smithereens in every possible aspect with his incompetence and ego. i want to say i'm astounded that morons on here and twitter are twisting themselves into pretzels trying to pin the blame on thomas instead of jeremy, but this is honestly par for the course with the collective brain worms disease that infects social media and especially the saltier and whinier parts of this fandom. also it's painfully obvious to anyone with a brain that a good 75% of the drama that thomas "caused" on twitter with snark about chronology/releases/writing/censorship/abruptly shortened story arcs was him having to cover up for jeremy's idiocy and greed to keep himself from being fired from his own show, but then again expecting a functioning brain cell is too much from most of you i guess.
574 notes - Posted March 28, 2022
#4
adrien at the end of penalteam: now that's what you call a CAT-HAS-TROPHY!!!
594 notes - Posted February 12, 2022
#3
literally everything about this episode was so perfect but the fact that they even recreated my favorite blink-and-you-miss it detail
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and made it BETTER by including the guy's legs dangling from the ceiling in the same shot... i will never not be obsessed with this series
821 notes - Posted June 25, 2022
#2
saw a post earlier today saying that twilight's real name might be james, since anya was subject 007 and bond (and bondman) is bond and that would complete the set of references, and i'm pretty sure endo said yor's name is short for "yolanda," which i googled just now and one of the first examples of notable people on the wikipedia page was
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i think there might be something to this theory
839 notes - Posted June 24, 2022
My #1 post of 2022
ladybug refuses to dm chat noir as civilians for the longest time and she claims it's for identity and security reasons but actually it's because she subconsciously knows that if they can text outside their suits she would send him six hundred cat pics a day all captioned "this u"
4,893 notes - Posted March 27, 2022
Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →
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sokoviareports · 2 years
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Owl forest footage report
[Note: The Question’s additions are in italics.]
AGENT(S): Doctor Mid-Nite, Charlie (owl)
LOCATION: Matchak-area forest
DATE / TIME: Mid-March to present (See detailed time log in gathered intel). Filed 16/04/2021.
IS THIS A FOLLOW-UP? Y
BRIEF: Anomalous high resolution video footage from Matchak-area forest, possibly coinciding with the predatory entity described in case #200321
MISSION REPORT: 
[Audio transcription]
30/04/2021 @0559: 
Begin recording. Hello. Today, Charlie and I will complete our review of his 336 hours of footage, largely from the forest surrounding Matchak. Isn’t that right, <translation: Urdu><sweetie>? <translation: Owl><Hoot.>
Computer, begin playback, fast forward times 200. No, times 100. I have time. Pause recording.
@0604: 
Resume recording. Pause playback. Footage from March 7 @2311. 
NOTES:  Stationary view. Oddly still. A notable zig-zaggy fissure outside any proper plane. Almost as if fixed to the lens of the camera, but the technology is well within parameters. I will run a diagnostic and a diagnostic on the diagnostic. <laughter> Very similar in appearance to an aural migraine. Light distorting into the line. Consuming, not emitting. I will attach clips and coordinates. 
Resume playback. Pause recording.
@0606: 
Resume recording. Pause playback. 
NOTES: Four days of footage passed since the previous note, but the image never moved. Like it was stuck. Charlie’s GPS, however, indicates normal movement. I have no physical explanation, nor one for why a supernatural phenomenon would affect a camera in this way, if that’s what happened instead. I do remember Charlie seemed a little stressed out last month. I’m sorry, <translation: Urdu><angel. I should have paid you more attention.>
<translation: Urdu><Resume playback. Pause recording.>
@0610:
 Pause playback. Resume recording.
NOTES: The image is stuck again. Same radius but a different angle to what appears to an otherwise identical fissure. Beginning March 15, lasting eight days this time. The lines of the fissure have remained fixed in place to the Earth, not the camera. 
Resume playback. Pause recording.
@0615:
Pause playback. Resume recording.. 
<translation: Urdu><You’re going there every night, aren’t you? Why?> <translation: Owl><Hoot.>
NOTES: He has broken into the previous radius. Closer, the line of the fissure looks impossibly thinner. Threadlike, but brighter. Maybe. Flimsy? I can’t explain it but I get the impression of fabric. And something behind it. But that isn’t scientific. It’s instinctual. Doctor Fate encourages instinctual notes. I apologize for the habit. This seems more like his territory. <translation: Owl><Hoot.>
Resume playback. Pause recording.
@0619:
Pause playback. Resume recording.
NOTES: We have arrived at present day. This last description is what I initially shared with Wonder Woman as I first reviewed this footage in reverse. Charlie moved closer. Close enough to capture the plant life surrounding the fissure. As I told her, unpatternized cycles of cellular life and death. No cellular turnover, only the same individual cells dying and healing at unpredictable speeds. The density of this phenomenon increases with proximity to the fissure. Simply not possible, but I suppose now it is. Pure conjecture, but I don’t know if these plants can be considered alive. Consider if this was observed in an animal. That is no life.
End playback. I look forward to your thoughts, Question, as always. End recording.
SCOPE: Unchanged. Are we safer with this knowledge or in more danger because of it? The next step to figure out, I suppose.
RISK LEVEL: Unchanged. Except perhaps that animals may have safer access to the depths of the forest. Likely; some evidence to suggest this may also be true of shapeshifting metahumans. Cannot confirm at this time due to limited sample size. 
[Medical records related to assessment and treatment of Rahne Sinclair in Mousehole infirmary following accidental injury by Green Arrow have been forwarded, privately, to Doctor Mid-Nite, with additional notes as follows: Sinclair spent some days in and around the affected area, consuming local game, without suffering presently apparent physical or psychological effect.]
INTEL GATHERED: 
A. 336 hours of high-resolution, high-speed footage
B. Topographic map of area covered, adjusted for sighted people 
C. Digitized flight trail and time log
D. Key still images
E. Hand drawings of images that couldn’t translate from invisible light
F. Present owl pellet analysis. Findings: Normal.
G. Owl examination chart. Findings: light indications of stress, primarily premature molting
H. Owl photo for morale Distributed in common areas for general consumption.
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wikiuntamed · 12 days
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Top 5 @Wikipedia pages from yesterday: Friday, 15th March 2024
Welcome, bienvenue, willkommen, bienvenido 🤗 What were the top pages visited on @Wikipedia (15th March 2024) 🏆🌟🔥?
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1️⃣: Ides of March "The Ides of March (; Latin: Idus Martiae, Medieval Latin: Idus Martii) is the day on the Roman calendar marked as the Idus, roughly the midpoint of a month, of Martius, corresponding to 15 March on the Gregorian calendar. It was marked by several major religious observances. In 44 BC, it became..."
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Image by Vincenzo Camuccini
2️⃣: Poor Things (film) "Poor Things is a 2023 film directed by Yorgos Lanthimos and written by Tony McNamara, based on the 1992 novel by Alasdair Gray. A co-production between Ireland, the United Kingdom, and the United States, the film stars Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe, Ramy Youssef, Christopher Abbott, and..."
3️⃣: Cleopatra "Cleopatra VII Thea Philopator (Koinē Greek: Κλεοπάτρα Θεά Φιλοπάτωρ lit. Cleopatra "father-loving goddess"; 70/69 BC – 10 August 30 BC) was Queen of the Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt from 51 to 30 BC, and its last active ruler. A member of the Ptolemaic dynasty, she was a descendant of its founder..."
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Image by Louis le Grand
4️⃣: Dune: Part Two "Dune: Part Two is a 2024 American epic science fiction film directed and co-produced by Denis Villeneuve, who co-wrote the screenplay with Jon Spaihts. It is the sequel to Dune (2021) and the second of a two-part adaptation of the 1965 novel Dune by Frank Herbert. It follows Paul Atreides as he..."
5️⃣: Deaths in 2024 "The following notable deaths occurred in 2024. Names are reported under the date of death, in alphabetical order. A typical entry reports information in the following sequence: Name, age, country of citizenship at birth, subsequent nationality (if applicable), what subject was noted for, cause of..."
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THE BOOK WAS BETTER
One more list for 2023: Time once again to post the list of books I moved my lips to during the year just past. As always, this doesn't include articles, short stories, comic books, poems, cereal boxes, Bazooka Joe wrappers, road signs, scoreboards, skywriting, graffiti, or "the room":
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N or M? by Agatha Christie
Anti-Semite and Jew by Jean-Paul Sartre
The Long March by William Styron
Hyperion by Friedrich Hölderlin
Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret by Judy Blume
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Understudy for Death by Charles Willeford
The Coven by E. Howard Hunt
What Makes Sammy Run? by Budd Schulberg
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood by Quentin Tarantino
The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece by Tom Hanks
The White Mountains by John Christopher
The City of Gold and Lead by John Christopher
The Pool of Fire by John Christopher
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As usual, I must start by sheepishly noting how embarrassingly short this list is; nowhere near the optimistic length I was hoping for at the beginning of the year. But it was still a fine year's reading, kicking off with the appallingly still-relevant Anti-Semite and Jew, one of several books I pulled off the shelves at my late sister's house in Virginia as momentos when The Kid and I were back there in January for her's and my brother-in-law's funeral (my sister and her husband died less than a month apart).
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The only book-length work I've ever read by Sartre, it offers, in its earlier chapters, the best, most concise distillation of the bigoted mindset that I've ever read. In the later chapters Sartre gets pretty deep in the weeds about the motivations of "inauthentic" Jews in ways that seemed to me presumptuous. But it's still an extraordinary read.
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Another I pulled from my sister's shelves was Budd Shulberg's What Makes Sammy Run? This turned out to be the first of three novels in a row I read about moviemaking, all by inarguable Hollywood insiders. The title character of Schulberg's famous 1941 yarn is the conniving Brooklyn-born hustler Sammy Glick, who runs up the ladder from newspaper copy boy to studio mogul, exploiting and stepping on everybody in his path.
Supposedly Sam Goldwyn offered Schulberg money to keep the book from being made into a movie; it remains unproduced as a feature to this day, though it was done as an early TV play and a successful Broadway musical. Goldwyn is said to have called it "doublecrossing the Jews," though as Schulberg pointed out, most of Sammy's victims in the story are also Jewish. In any case, Sammy's deviousness and sociopathic mendacity are an American archetype that transcends race. My biggest take-away from the book was that, bad as Sammy is, he's still less odious than our 45th President.
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Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is his 2021 reimagining, as a popular '70s-era paperback, of his own 2019 movie set in Tinseltown (and elsewhere) in 1969. As with the movie, it freely mixes real-life figures with fictitious characters, movies, TV shows and incidents, sometimes ridiculing sacred cows (Bruce Lee, most notably), sometimes forging into the realm of alternate history.
The book is not, however, a "novelization" in the usual sense; though he uses the same characters as in the movie, he presents them mostly in different episodes. The boyish wishful-thinking fantasy of revisionist violence with which he climaxes the film is referred to only in passing in the novel, around mid-point, while backstories and interior perspectives are explored in detail. I loved the film, but even if you didn't, you might like the book; I think I liked it a little better.
There's a sort of guileless stylistic freedom with which Tarantino writes prose fiction that I found highly enviable. For instance, throughout the novel he keeps describing a (fictitious) episode of the (real) '60s TV show Lancer on which his faded cowboy star hero has a juicy guest role as a villain. As Tarantino omnisciently describes the episode's plot, and warms to it, said plot gradually, and seemingly without conscious transition, takes over the narrative so that we no longer seem to be reading a story-within-a-story; we're just reading a good ripping western yarn.
Then when we shift back to the Hollywood story, it seems similarly artless and unfussy. This unpretentious feel may, of course, be an effect that Tarantino carefully worked to attain. But I doubt it; I think he's just lucky enough not to know better; blessedly unfettered by the "rules" of fiction writing.
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Third in my unofficial Hollywood trilogy was The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece by Tom Hanks. This one, which traces the genesis, development and shooting of a big-budget superhero flick based on a '60s-era underground comic, is also stuffed with stories-within-the-story, including two well-done fake vintage comic books, one a gung-ho '40s WWII-era flamethrower tale and the other a parody of it from the San Francisco underground scene of the '60s.
I understand the reviews for this shaggy-dog debut novel were cool at best, but I really enjoyed it. As drama it's a little mild, admittedly, with most of the characters, and especially the movie's good guy director, behaving quite respectfully and decently toward each other in a distinctly Hanksian manner. I found this sort of refreshing, and the author's digressions and obsessively-imagined worlds came to life for me. The book's overriding point seems to be that movies are made not so much by visionary artists as by relentless problem solvers.
Perhaps not surprisingly, therefore, his most vivid creation is his portrait of an insufferable young actor who's cast in the male lead and instantly paralyzes the production with his raging narcissism and unprofessionalism. The novel could have used more of this guy, and inevitably it makes you wonder if Hanks was thinking of anybody in particular.
Also, I appreciated that Hanks threw a shout-out to my beloved hometown of Erie, Pennsylvania (where he also set his directorial debut That Thing You Do!). 
Elsewhere on this blog I commented on The Coven by E. Howard Hunt and William Styron's The Long March. My year-end choice was more relaxing; I finally got around to John Christopher's "Tripods" trilogy of The White Mountains, The City of Gold and Lead and The Pool of Fire, which I'd been curious about since elementary school. Good stuff; I would have enjoyed them greatly back in my younger days. That's what I get for being lazy.
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I also took on Hölderlin's Hyperion (1797), which, like The Long March, I picked up at the VNSA book sale. It's a philosophical yarn--it probably influenced Nietzche and Heidegger more than it did other novelists--written in a heightened poetic language, hence pages and pages of rhapsodizing about Love and Nature and the Beauty of Greece (where Hölderlin never set foot) and the superiority of classical Greek culture to modern culture. It can wear you down after a while, even if you more or less share his feelings.
A sample: At one point the titular hero is holding forth to his lover Diotima:
“‘Let me,’ I cried, ‘let me be yours, let me forget myself, let all the life of the body and spirit in me fly but to you; but to you, in blissful, endless contemplation! O Diotima! So did I once stand, too, before the shadowy divine image that my love created for itself; before the idol of my lonely dreams; I nourished it faithfully; I animated it with my life, with my heart’s hopes I refreshed it, warmed it, but it gave me nothing save what I had given, and when I had become impoverished, it left me poor; and now! Now I have you in my arms and I feel the breath of your breast, and feel your eyes in mine, your beautiful presence flows into all my senses, and I can bear it, now I possess all that is most glorious, and tremble no longer, yes! Truly I am not he who I was, Diotima! I have become like you, and divinity plays with divinity like children playing together!’”
To which Diotima replies:
“‘But try to be a little calmer,’ she said.”
That was my favorite line in the book.
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dumb-fuck27 · 2 months
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I don’t everyone knows exactly what happened in the past 4 years so here’s a list.
2020:
The continent of Australia was on fire for 3 months starting in December of 2019
The prince of England and his family left royalty in the start of January
Covid-19 became a world wide pandemic in February which caused a toilet paper shortage, at least 750,000 deaths, every non essential store to close (some for good), racism against anyone and everyone who looked somewhat Asian, and so much more.
Kobe Bryant died in a helicopter crash with his daughter.
The FIRST impeachment of trump
Harvey Weinstein was FINALLY convicted on February 24th of raping and sexually abusing a young actress and film crew since he was first accused during the metoo movement
The stock market crashed so bad it was the modern equivalent of the 20-30s stock market crash (march 9th 2020)
The black lives matter protest started.
Kim Jon Un was rumored to be dead for an entire month.
Biden wins the election
Twitter gets fucking hacked
Ghislaine Maxwell was arrested for sec trafficking
3 inch murder hornets suddenly appear in the US
Beirut fucking exploded… like the entire capital city
Kalama Harris is chosen as vice president
Chadwick basemen aka the black panther died of cancer
The entire west coast was on fire
Ruth bader Ginsburg died
The denier of covid-19 Donald trump caught Covid-19
Eddie Van Halen died of cancer
Biden wins the election
Alex Trebek died of cancer
Covid-19 finally got a vaccine made. This caused death in the people who tried to substitute the vaccine with horse dewormer, fish aquarium chemicals, and just adamant denial of vaccines.
Covid-19 financial relief finally comes out
2021:
Covid-19 death toll went from at least 750,00 to over 1 million starting in January
In January 6 trump told his devout followers to go to the capital and protest the election results which ended in the protester braking in, destroying property, the death of multiple police and security guards, defecation and urination on files and in room, pipe bombs were found on site, the political officials were ushered out all the while trump sent the national guard away from the capital
Trump claim voter fraud which was proven against trumps case where voter fraud was found on trump.
The US rejoins Paris’ climate accord with WHO
The US military withdrawals from the Middle East living equipment and some men behind
Notable foreign leaders step down from power just as Raul Castro, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Angela Merkel
Alexey Navalny pitons political rivial returns to Russia after recovering from Putin poisoning him from being out spoken against Putin
A huge earthquake in Haiti followed by flash floods leaving 2,200 people dead
The 2020 Tokyo Olympics happen in 2021
2 mass shootings happen with in a week for each other in march
A 12 story condominium collapsed killing 98 people
Winter storms in Texas shit down power to the entire state
Followed by historical record braking heat waves in the west
Hurricane ida hits
The officer who millled George Floyd was convicted of second degree murder
R. Kelly was convicted of sex trafficking
Brittny Spears is free from her controlling life as a pop star
Another rover lands on mars
Jeff Bezos safely lands his space ship (sadly)
Facebook struggles containing hate speech
2022:
Apple stocks hit 3 trillion dollars
Baby formula shortages happens
Brittney Griner detain in Russia for having illegal drugs on her person
Roddy’s invaded Ukraine
The fish from Shark Tales slaps the zebra from Madagascar 
Microplastic found in human blood
Johnny Depp wins amber heard false sexual assault allegations
Monkeypox outbreak spreads like wild fire
Buffalo supermarket shooter targets black people in mass shooting
Uvalde school shooting
Abortion is outlawed
Ketanji brown Jackson is sworn in as the first black j woman to be a supreme judge
Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe is assassinated
The Choco Taco is laid to rest
The queen of England dies. The reports from the after life says that princess Diana had a couple things to say to her when she arrived.
Iran erupts in protest over the hijab laws
NASA defends the earth from an asteroid by smashing a rocket into it
The try guys are outed for cheating
Alex jones goes against sandy hooks parents in trial and looses
Elon musk buys twitter and twitter flops
The democrats win midterm election
The world population reaches 8 billion
Club Q nightclub shooting results in 5 deaths and 25 injuries
The worlds largest active volcano erupts in Hawaii
Once again, no student loan forgiveness
Worlds oldest DNA sample found in Greenland
Scientists discover nuclear fusion
US marks 10 years since sandy hook
Argentina wins World Cup
2023:
67,000 people die in massive earthquake in Syria
India takes the #1 spot for highest population count
The lost submarine next to the titanic
The Ukrainian war is still happening
Ongoing hamas and Israeli war killing millions of innocents from both sides
Bangladesh election protests
Canada and India relations get a little worse
2023 Nashville school shooting
150 people were killing is massive Nepal earthquake
And the best for last… gumball waterson kicks a Minecraft YouTuber ass after the YouTuber mocks back while not want to talk about pedophile allegations. Law suit underway while pedophile allegations are being looked into.
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healthstyle101 · 5 months
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Ex-USC Gynecologist Charged with Assault on Students Dies Pre-Trial
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Former USC Gynecologist George Tyndall Dies Amidst Pending Charges A former gynecologist, George Tyndall, who was the focal point of a staggering $1 billion in university settlements linked to allegations of sexual abuse by hundreds of women, passed away on Wednesday, as reported by The Associated Press. His attorney, Leonard Levine, confirmed Tyndall's death at the age of 76 on Thursday. Tyndall was awaiting trial for over two dozen criminal misconduct charges allegedly taking place between 2009 and 2016 at the University of Southern California's student health center. According to Levine, a close friend of Tyndall discovered him deceased in his Los Angeles home on Wednesday, after he failed to answer her calls. While no specific trial date was set, Tyndall had a court date scheduled later this month to establish one. He had consistently maintained his innocence and expressed a desire to present his case before a jury. Tyndall faced a total of 35 alleged counts of sexual misconduct, which were later reduced to 27. These included 18 counts of sexual penetration of an unconscious person and 9 counts of sexual battery by fraud. These charges were based on allegations from 16 former patients at the campus student health center. The accusations against Tyndall came to light in 2018 following an investigation by the Los Angeles Times, which uncovered complaints of sexual misconduct dating back to the 1990s. In 2016, he was suspended by the university after a nurse reported him to a rape crisis center. He subsequently resigned quietly and received a substantial payout the following year. Many women reported their allegations to the police, but due to various factors, not all of these cases could lead to criminal charges. In March 2021, USC reached a landmark settlement of $852 million with over 700 women who had accused Tyndall of sexual abuse. Notably, Tyndall invoked his rights against self-incrimination during the deposition for the settlement, did not contribute any money to it, and did not admit wrongdoing. John Manly, the lead counsel in the civil case, pointed to district attorneys, both former and current, for the extended delays in pressing criminal charges. Manly also represented victims in the criminal proceedings. He noted that the case's protraction had further traumatized the victims and postponed the trials, potentially denying the clients justice. Aside from the $852 million settlement, USC had agreed in 2019 to pay $215 million to settle a class-action lawsuit covering about 18,000 female patients of Tyndall. Compensation ranged from $2,500 to $250,000, regardless of whether formal accusations had been made against Tyndall for harassment or assault. The Associated Press contributed to this report. Read the full article
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jhapalitimes · 9 months
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Travis Scott Escapes Criminal Charges in Astroworld Tragedy, Investigation Concludes
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Travis Scott Escapes Criminal Charges for Deadly Astroworld Festival: Houston Grand Jury Decision In a recent development, Travis Scott has been cleared of criminal charges in connection with the tragic Astroworld festival. A Houston grand jury made this decision on Thursday, relating to the incident that occurred in November 2021. During the festival, a crowd crush resulted in the loss of ten lives and left hundreds injured as eager fans surged toward the stage for the rapper's performance. Despite the declaration of a mass casualty event at 9:38 p.m., the concert continued until 10:15 p.m. Earlier reports had confirmed that all ten victims, including a 9-year-old, succumbed to compression asphyxia caused by the immense pressure exerted by the surrounding crowd. The festival hosted an estimated 50,000 attendees, which was below the maximum capacity of 200,000 specified by the Houston fire code. Notably, Travis Scott served as both a headliner and a promoter for Astroworld, alongside Live Nation and ScoreMore. While criminal charges have been ruled out for Scott, all three entities still face multiple civil lawsuits alleging negligence, wrongful death, and other offenses. During a press conference, Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg emphasized their responsibility to determine if any criminal activity was involved in this "disastrous, horrific event." When faced with such incidents where the presence of a crime is uncertain, the customary practice is to present the cases before grand juries, as stated by Ogg. Houston Police Chief Troy Finner revealed that his office will release a comprehensive report detailing the findings of their extensive investigation. Acknowledging the complexity of the case, Finner highlighted the importance of providing the report, which spans almost 1,200 pages, to the public. He expressed heartfelt sympathy for the families who have patiently awaited answers for over a year and seven months. In response to the grand jury's decision, a representative for Travis Scott stated, "My client Travis Scott will not be charged with criminal charges or any wrongdoing for his involvement with AstroWorld festival." They asserted that this outcome confirms their belief that Scott is not responsible for the tragic events at Astroworld. The representative also highlighted Scott's efforts to halt the show on three separate occasions and his unawareness of the unfolding events. With this chapter now closed, they expressed hope that the government's focus will shift towards preventing future heartbreaking tragedies like Astroworld. The Times received a statement from a spokesperson representing Kherker Garcia, a Houston-based firm handling civil lawsuits on behalf of numerous Astroworld attendees. Expressing disappointment in the absence of criminal charges against Travis Scott, they affirmed their commitment to pursuing justice on behalf of the hundreds of injury victims. Their objective is to ensure that the responsible parties are held accountable. In March, Travis Scott made his first festival appearance since Astroworld at the Rolling Loud festival held in Inglewood's Hollywood Park. Despite stopping short of encouraging wild behavior among the crowd, Scott appeared content to reclaim his position as the "king of the pit," as noted by The Times' Mikael Wood. The performance, although brief, effectively showcased the resilience of his brand, undeterred by controversy. Read the full article
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lowkeynando · 11 months
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an average 1,041 metres (3,415 ft) above the sea level. The stream Novella is nearby. [13]
Malosco is within walking distance of Fondo, [13] the two towns being adjacent to each other with Fondo lying in the northwest. [12] In addition to Fondo, Malosco also borders the municipalities of Ronzone, Sarnonico and Eppan. The Dasine woods and meadows are located to the north of the main town. Lago di Santa Giustina, which is several kilometres to the southwest. [12]
Monterrubio de la Serena is a municipality in the province of Badajoz, Extremadura, Spain.
According to the 2014 census, [2] the municipality has a population of 2537 inhabitants. Marko Jelic (born 15 March 1976) is a Croatian politician and university professor who is serving as prefect of Sibenik-Knin County since 2021. [1] He previously served as Mayor of Knin from 2017 to 2021. Radulphus or simply Ralph was an early 13th-century bishop of Brechin, Scotland. He was elected to the bishopric as early as 1198 or 1199 when he appears as "bishop of Brechin" witnessing the nativity of the future king Alexander II. He may have been elected before that, for he was
"elect" in the time of Gilbert, Prior of St Andrews, who was prior between 1196 and 1198.
Radulphus was consecrated in 1202. His one notable action was the granting of the church of
"Glenylif" to Cambuskenneth Abbey. His death date is not known, but occurred before 1214s CLONES
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elyaqim · 1 year
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Deaths, 2021–2022
My original intent was to promptly write about the large number of deaths that had occurred among people I knew, some of them in my family, from March 2021 to February 2022, a year as roughly determined from springtime to wintertime, as many cultures do. Due to subsequent tragedies combined with my avoidance of writing such an emotionally unpleasant article, I procrastinated for about a year, but am now finding the will to finally do it. It should be noted that I am not aware that any of these deaths were caused by a coronavirus.
Marc Matthew Atkins (d. 18 Aug. 2016): In 2021, I learned that one of my closest friends in my late teens and early twenties had died five years earlier without my even knowing it. Marc and I met in the group Gay & Lesbian Youth of New York and became close friends and confidants, getting together socially, laughing on the telephone together and opening up to one another about our family lives. We reconnected in our thirties and spent some time together but eventually drifted apart again, only remaining in contact online without actually communicating anymore. I was devastated to learn of his passing, especially as I wished I could have been with him during his last days, and I find myself thinking of him quite frequently. (Notably, he was the son of popular singer Gwen Edwards of the Co‐Eds.)
Darlene Lorraine De Betta (d. 3 Mar. 2021): Darlene was a friendly coworker of mine in the 2000s, always good for some chat at the cloakroom where she worked. She and I occasionally socialized outside of work too, including at dinner parties at the home of a fellow coworker who treated the staff like family.
Edward S. Berens (d. 13 Mar. 2021): I met Ed in the community group Gay Men of the Bronx in the 1990s, and it turned out that we not only both lived in the Bronx, but that he also had a home in Monticello, the village where my parents lived at the time. Ed was very funny and entertaining and invited me to both of his homes at various times. He also once bought a great outfit he knew I would want to wear in a local talent show and then would not accept reimbursement therefor.
Alix Dobkin (d. 19 May 2021): I only met Alix Dobkin once, during the intermission of one of her concerts at Queens College, and so was able to inquire about a phrase in one of her songs. I have since outgrown the identitarian, separatist ideology that she advanced in some of her songs, but her music was very important to me and to my friends in our politically charged adolescence.
Carl Edmund Woollen (d. 12 July 2021): Carl, the quirky twin brother of an earlier friend of mine in the neighborhood, moved into my building and began attending N. Y. Bear Den, a group wherein his participation would grow considerably, brainstorming with us and having some of us over to his apartment for Scrabble and cribbage.
Aunt Shirley (d. 6 Aug. 2021): Shirley was a beloved grand‐aunt by marriage, the wife of the only sibling of my maternal grandmother’s to be born in the United States. They lived in Maryland so I did not see them often.
Christopher John Williams (d. 13 Aug. 2021): I met Christopher in 2014 at a Thanksgiving gathering in my neighborhood for those of us who could not attend a family gathering. I liked his sassy sense of humor and his flirtatious personality. We took a shine to one another but I do not recall ever seeing him again, our interactions thereafter happening solely on Facebook.
Justin Evan K. (d. 5 Jan. 2022): Although he was my first cousin, once removed, Justin is the only person on this list I had not met. Due to a longstanding rift in the family, I fell out of contact with my father’s sister’s daughters until I learned of Justin’s death in his thirties from a congenital problem I was not aware he had.
Carl Rosenblum (d. 13 Feb. 2022): Carl was a personable and perceptive older man I met in the gay men’s discussion group at Queens Pride House who would also usually go out to eat with other participants thereafter. It was always pleasant to speak with him, both inside and outside the meetings.
George Hains (d. 18 Feb. 2022): George was the affable and corpulent organizer of numerous events at Rockbar, a West Village venue I frequented a number of years back.
One of the principal lessons I had to relearn in this period was not to rely on social‐media platforms so heavily anymore, but to see friends in person (or at least spend time with them on the telephone) before it is too late to do so. Unfortunately, spring 2022 brought more deaths with it.
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intlforestday · 1 year
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Expert Panel on Forests and Human Health.
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IUFRO's Global Forest Expert Panel (GFEP) on Forests and Human Health will host a webinar on March 21, where they will discuss the key messages of their latest assessment. There is growing evidence that nature, particularly forests, contributes to physical and mental well-being and can notably improve human health.
Webinar: Expert Panel on Forests and Human Health.
The United Nations estimates that less than half of the global population is covered by essential health services. Adding to the low rate of coverage, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has caused further healthcare disruptions that could reverse decades of improvements. Moreover, in recent years, there has been a surge in zoonotic diseases such as COVID-19, SARS, MERS, Ebola, Malaria, and the avian flu, and illness and deaths from such diseases are expected to spike in the future. The implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) can strengthen the momentum for combatting these pressing challenges. The third Sustainable Development Goal (SDG 3) aims to ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages.
Several studies have concluded that nature, particularly forests, contribute to physical and mental well-being and can notably improve human health. Forests can act as a buffer that maintains well-being, provides resources (e.g., food and medicine) and services such as air purification or recreation, especially in urban areas, potentially reducing exposure to environmental diseases and other hazards. However, the relationship between forests and human health is complex, as evidence also shows that forest proximate communities are more prone to zoonotic and infectious diseases, which are often exacerbated by forest degradation and encroachment.
Consequently, in July 2021, IUFRO initiated a global scientific assessment on forests and human health in the frame of the Collaborative Partnership on Forests (CPF)'s Global Forest Expert Panels (GFEP) initiative. The assessment will provide reliable and synthesized scientific information, crucial to efficiently utilize the synergies and achieve optimal trade-offs between human health, and the conservation, restoration, and sustainable management of forest ecosystems, their biodiversity (including wildlife), as well as trees in other land-uses. The report and the accompanying policy brief will also present response options relevant to the policy context at various levels.
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This global assessment report planned to be published in March 2023, will contribute to the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development by highlighting the nexus between SDG 3: Good Health and Well-Being and SDG 15: Life on Land, as well as relevant links to other SDGs. The assessment will provide input to the 2023 session of the UN High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF 2023), the 18th session of the United Nations Forum on Forests (UNFF18) and other international forums considering forest-related issues, such as the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD COP-16) and the UN Climate Change Conference (UNFCCC COP-27).
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