Recent Song Quotes

I want you to understand something. That man? He’s not some boyfriend in a line of them. He is my alpha and omega. He is the sky over me. Without him, I’m lost. There’s no one else, no one whose soul balances mine the way his does. I’ve waited my life for him, and when he came, I didn’t recognize him. Not until recently. If I lose him, I swear, as God is my witness, I will be alone. No man can match him.

Then he talks about his recent success creating a musical chip that’s tiny enough to be concealed in a flake of glitter but can hold hours of songs.

Every so often in life, you randomly cross paths with someone that touches you in a way that you really can't explain, but somehow you know that you will never be the same again. A person that is unknowingly, so incredibly beautiful, both inside and out, that they take your breath away. Recently, I met someone exactly like that. As a matter of fact, I'm still not convinced that she isn't an angel here to protect me from myself and the rest of you crazies... these next few songs are for my angel. I hope the rest of you find your angel someday. Just remember, don't let go when you do, even if they try to fly away.

Dr. Cai Song is an internationally known researcher at the University of British Columbia and co-author of a recent textbook, Fundamentals of Psychoneuroimmunology. “I am convinced that Alzheimer’s is an autoimmune disease,” says Dr. Song. “It is probably triggered by chronic stress acting on an aging immune system.

I always say that anybody who’s single ― like Sara ― their love is the most intense love. The heartbreak they’re enduring is the most intense heartbreak. We cannot understand what Sara’s going through. When it’s love, it’s my love, you can’t understand it. You can’t compare. But I really related to where Sara was on this record. When she was writing these songs and coming to me like: You don’t understand, I was like: You’re right, but I also do.

Persephone.” He says my name like it’s a song he’s recently memorized. “Who said anything about warning off everyone else?” He nips my earlobe lightly. “What if I want to share? What if I pull your panties to the side and let whoever is interested come over here and fuck you against my chest?

I want to give just a slight indication of the influence the book has had. I knew that George Orwell, in his second novel, A Clergyman's Daughter , published in 1935, had borrowed from Joyce for his nighttime scene in Trafalgar Square, where Deafie and Charlie and Snouter and Mr. Tallboys and The Kike and Mrs. Bendigo and the rest of the bums and losers keep up a barrage of song snatches, fractured prayers, curses, and crackpot reminiscences. But only on my most recent reading of Ulysses did I discover, in the middle of the long and intricate mock-Shakespeare scene at the National Library, the line 'Go to! You spent most of it in Georgina Johnson's bed, clergyman's daughter.' So now I think Orwell quarried his title from there, too.

Sure, occasionally a certain sappy song or romantic movie would come on, and you’d wonder what he or she was up to, but there was no way to know. Of course, you could always pick up the phone (and more recently, text or e-mail), but that would require that person’s knowing you were thinking of him or her. Where’s the fun in that? You never want them to know you’re thinking of them, so you refrain. Before long the memories start to fade. One day, you realize you can’t quite remember how she smelled or the exact color of his eyes. Eventually, without ever knowing it, you just forget that person altogether. You replace old memories with new ones, and life goes on. It was the clean break you needed to move forward.

Morgan State University political science professor Jason Johnson recently wrote on “The Root of our National Anthem,” “It is one of the most racist, pro-slavery, anti-black songs in the American lexicon. . . . ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ is as much a patriotic song as it is a diss track to black people who had the audacity to fight for their freedom.

He remembered being a kid, all the things he felt capable of, all the streets and avenues that branched away from his body, all the possibilities. But in the end you can only have one life. One at a time, at least. You could turn, you could pause for awhile, but you couldn't go down two streets at once. The things they didn't end up doing, the places and people they decided against, all defined them as much as anything else, in the way negative space defines a photo or a song. The lives they didn't lead were there, too, always with them. Only recently did he begin to see the shape those choices had made.

The apartment was entirely, was only, for her: a wall of books, both read and unread, all of them dear to her not only in themselves, their tender spines, but in the moments or periods they evoked. She had kept some books since college that she had acquired for courses and never read—Fredric Jameson, for example, and Kant’s Critique of Judgment—but which suggested to her that she was, or might be, a person of seriousness, a thinker in some seeping, ubiquitous way; and she had kept, too, a handful of children’s books taken fro her now-dismantled girlhood room, like Charlotte’s Web and the Harriet the Spy novels, that conjured for her an earlier, passionately earnest self, the sober child who read constantly in the back of her parents’ Buick, oblivious to her brother punching her knee, oblivious to her parents’ squabbling, oblivious to the traffic and landscapes pressing upon her from outside the window. She had, in addition to her books, a modest shelf of tapes and CDs that served a similar, though narrower, function…she was aware that her collection was comprised largely of mainstream choices that reflected—whether popular or classical—not so much an individual spirit as the generic tastes of her times: Madonna, the Eurythmics, Tracy Chapman from her adolescence; Cecilia Bartoli, Anne-Sophie Mutter, Mitsuko Uchida; more recently Moby and the posthumously celebrated folk-singing woman from Washington, DC, who had died of a melanoma in her early thirties, and whose tragic tale attracted Danielle more than her familiar songs. Her self, then, was represented in her books; her times in her records; and the rest of the room she thought of as a pure, blank slate.

I’m sleepin’ in your pee pee, and I’m dreaming of what could be.” That’s just the chorus of a little love song I recently wrote.

Project Princess Teeny feet rock layered double socks Popping side piping of many colored loose lace ups Racing toe keeps up with fancy free gear slick slide and just pressed recently weaved hair Jeans oversized belie her hips, back, thighs that have made guys sigh for milleni year Topped by an attractive jacket her suit’s not for flacking, flunkies, junkies or punk homies on the stroll. Her hands mobile thrones of today’s urban goddess Clinking rings link dragon fingers no need to be modest. One or two gap teeth coolin’ sport gold initials Doubt you get to her name just check from the side please chill. Multidimensional shrimp earrings frame her cinnamon face Crimson with a compliment if a comment hits the right place Don’t step to the plate with datelines from ‘88 Spare your simple, fragile feelings with the same sense that you came Color woman variation reworks the french twist with crinkle cut platinum frosted bangs from a spray can’s mist Never dissed, she insists: “No you can’t touch this.” And, if pissed, bedecked fists stop boys who must persist. She’s the one. Give her some. Under fire. Smoking gun. Of which songs are sung, raps are spun, bells are rung, rocked, pistols cocked, unwanted advances blocked, well stacked she’s jock. It’s all about you girl. You go on. Don’t you dare stop.

Baseball remains one of the most fertile grounds for inventive wordplay in American life. Among the more notable—and on the face of it more bewildering—recent neologisms are to dial 8 for a home run and Linda Ronstadt for a good fastball. Dial 8 comes from the practice among hotels of requiring customers to dial 8 for a long-distance line. Linda Ronstadt, more complicatedly, is an allusion to her song “Blue Bayou,” the significance of which becomes less puzzling when you reflect that a good fastball “blew by you.” Baseball terms presumed to be new often are not.

Alex was right in front of the mantel now, bent forward, his nose mere inches from a picture of me. "Oh,God. Don't look at that!" It was from the year-end recital of my one and only year of ballet class. I was six: twig legs, a huge gap where my two front teeth had recently been, and a bumblebee costume. Nonna had done her best, but there was only so much she could do with yellow and black spandex and a bee butt. Dad had found one of those headbands with springy antennai attached. I'd loved the antennae. The more enthusiastic my jetes, the more they bounced. Of course, I'd also jeted my flat-chested little self out of the top of my costume so many times that, during the actual recital itself,I'd barely moved at all, victim to the overwhelming modesty of the six-year-old. Now, looking at the little girl I'd been, I wished someone had told her not to worry so much, that within a year, that smooth, skinny, little bare shoulder would have turned into the bane of her existence. That she was absolutely perfect. "Nice stripes," Alex said casually, straightening up. That stung. It should't have-it was just a photo-but it did. I don't know what I'd expected him to say about the picture. It wasn't that. But then, I didn't expect the wide grin that spread across his face when he got a good look at mine, either. "Those," he announced, pointing to a photo of my mulleted dad leaning against the painted hood of his Mustang "are nice stripes. That-" he pointed to the me-bee- "Is seriously cute." "You're insane," I muttered, insanely pleased. "Yeah,well, tell me something I don't know." He took the bottle and plate from me. "I like knowing you have a little vanity in there somewhere." He stood, hands full, looking expectant and completely beautiful. The reality of the situation hadn't really been all that real before. Now, as I started up the stairs to my bedroom, Alex Bainbridge in tow, it hit me. I was leading a boy, this boy, into my very personal space. Then he started singing. "You're so vain, I bet you think this song is about you. You're sooo vain....!" He had a pretty good voice. It was a truly excellent AM radio song. And just like that, I was officially In Deep

Small underwater creatures that look like mini kittens covered in colorful scales. Although they have venomous fangs, murcats can be sweet once trained—though few choose them as a pet. (Linh Song adopted one recently, named Princess Purryfins.)

In Banaras, I asked a monk, “To hold onto human character, one must have at least one desire. What is your desire.” He replied, “I have only one desire: Moksha or liberation from mortal bodies.” I said, “You are using the desire to leave the body to hold on to the body. Isn’t that contradiction? Aren’t you stuck in a loop of contradiction?” Recently, I met an old man in Chamundi Hills. He was singing praise of Maa Chamundi. I asked him, “Baba, what is your one desire that you are using to hold onto this body?” He replied, “Desire to sing songs in praise of Maa Chamundi.” I asked, “What about the desire of Moksha? Don’t you want to be free from this bondage?” He replied, “There is just one soul who is free- the Paramatma. I am that.” I said, “But how come you are stuck in this human body?” He said, “Young man! My mortal form is only in your mind. When you let go of your mind, you can meet me as Paramatma - the free soul. Then there is no you and me. There is just Paramatma.

[T]he old stories of human relationships with animals can't be discounted. They are not primitive; they are primal. They reflect insights that came from considerable and elaborate systems of knowledge, intellectual traditions and ways of living that were tried, tested, and found true over many thousands of years and on all continents. But perhaps the truest story is with the animals themselves because we have found our exemplary ways through them, both in the older world and in the present time, both physically and spiritually. According to the traditions of the Seneca animal society, there were medicine animals in ancient times that entered into relationships with people. The animals themselves taught ceremonies that were to be performed in their names, saying they would provide help for humans if this relationship was kept. We have followed them, not only in the way the early European voyagers and prenavigators did, by following the migrations of whales in order to know their location, or by releasing birds from cages on their sailing vessels and following them towards land, but in ways more subtle and even more sustaining. In a discussion of the Wolf Dance of the Northwest, artists Bill Holm and William Reid said that 'It is often done by a woman or a group of women. The dance is supposed to come from the wolves. There are different versions of its origin and different songs, but the words say something like, 'Your name is widely known among the wolves. You are honored by the wolves.' In another recent account, a Northern Cheyenne ceremonialist said that after years spent recovering from removals and genocide, indigenous peoples are learning their lost songs back from the wolves who retained them during the grief-filled times, as thought the wolves, even though threatened in their own numbers, have had compassion for the people.... It seems we have always found our way across unknown lands, physical and spiritual, with the assistance of the animals. Our cultures are shaped around them and we are judged by the ways in which we treat them. For us, the animals are understood to be our equals. They are still our teachers. They are our helpers and healers. They have been our guardians and we have been theirs. We have asked for, and sometimes been given, if we've lived well enough, carefully enough, their extraordinary powers of endurance and vision, which we have added to our own knowledge, powers and gifts when we are not strong enough for the tasks required of us. We have deep obligations to them. Without other animals, we are made less. (from her essay "First People")

For our species, the idea of art as ornament is a relatively new one. Our ape brains got too big, too big for our heads, too big for our mothers to birth them. So we started keeping all our extra knowing in language, in art, in stories and books and songs. Art was a way of storing our brains in each other’s. It wasn’t until fairly recently in human history, when rich landowners wanted something pretty to look at in winter, that the idea of art-as-mere-ornament came around. A painting of a blooming rose to hang on the mantel when the flowers outside the window had gone to ice. And still in the twenty-first century, it’s hard for folks to move past that. This idea that beauty is the horizon toward which all great art must march. I’ve never been interested in that. “As heaven spins, I fall into bedlam.

Jaime knew the look in his sister's eyes. He had seen it before, most recently on the night of Tommen's wedding, when she burned the Tower of the Hand. The green light of the wildfire had bathed the face of the watchers, so they looked like nothing so much as rotting corpses, a pack of gleeful ghouls, but some of the corpses were prettier than others. Even in the baleful glow, Cersei had been beautiful to look upon. She'd stood with one hand on her breast, her lips parted, her green eyes shining. She is crying, Jaime had realized, but whether it was from grief or ecstasy he could not have said.

When a song is ended, it leaves nothing but a feeling in those who heard it until that feeling, slowly moving backwards in time, collapses under pressure from more recent feelings and is replaced. Events become memories, unreliable stories, fade away at the ends. Unconnected and distinct from the day's experience, they become one of the millions of strata that make us who we are. We are the sum of all our experiences. We are waves on the ocean, interacting with and affected by all the other waves that move and die and are washed up on the shore. We are each a breath, a song, a flower. We are time itself, and mine has been long and I've collected many disconnected layers.

Anansi stories were, up to recently, frequently told to children at bedtime,’ Olive Senior confirms.‘The telling of Anansi stories is part of the tradition of African villages where everyone gathered around a fire at night to hear the old tales. In Jamaica, as in Africa, Anansi stories were in the past never told in the daytime. Among adults they are still told at wakes and moonlight gatherings.’3 Louise listened to many Anancy stories. She also read some, including those in Jamaican Song and Story,4 collected and edited by Walter Jekyll (an Englishman, a mentor of Claude McKay).When the Jekyll collection was republished in 1966 she contributed one of the introductory essays, in which she wrote:

You chide yourself for walking too far ahead, for regressing into 80s song lyrics territory so soon. But then he says, "The supermassive black hole at the center of the milky way recently sparked 75 times brighter over the course of a 2 hour period, and twice as bright as it's ever been in the 20 years astronomers have been monitoring it." By now you're used to him talking Science, but you're not sure where he's going with this. "One theory," he continues "is that the event was caused by a star about 15 times bigger than the sun getting close to the edge of the black hole disturbing some gasses, heating things up, increasing the infrared radiation from the edge. But get this, we observed that star getting close to the black hole about a year before we observed the affects on the black hole." "That just shows how vast the universe is, how enormous the distance," you say. "Exactly! Distances, plural. The distance between the star and the edge of the black hole, and the distance between the black hole and Earth. So, I say all of this to say that sometimes wheels are set in motion long before the spark is manifest. Is that the same thing as fate? I don't know but...I do know that rare brilliant events take time.

The post-war world fell into a frenzy. People wanted to celebrate life and clear away the rubble; they wanted to dance heathen dances of survival, they wanted to drink, they wanted to celebrate, they wanted to gorge themselves on all the things they had lacked in recent years. People wanted shallow operettas, they wanted risqué songs, they wanted nice, sentimental films with rural settings. They wanted to forget; they wanted to live as if there were no tomorrow — and no yesterday.

We preach body confidence, but we live in a culture that doesn’t quite know what to do with a woman who actually likes the way she looks. It’s considered arrogant and even unfeminine. Think of the recent hit One Direction song that made the claim that a woman was beautiful precisely because she didn’t know she was beautiful. We need to question a culture that tells women they must be beautiful to be loved, but that they shouldn’t actually feel beautiful or we’ll find them conceited.

Recently a group of researchers conducted a computer analysis of three decades of hit songs. The researchers reported a statistically significant trend toward narcissism and hostility in popular music. In line with their hypothesis, they found a decrease in usages such as we and us and an increase in I and me. The researchers also reported a decline in words related to social connection and positive emotions, and an increase in words related to anger and antisocial behavior, such as hate or kill.

Pegi just recorded "I Don't Want to Talk About," written by Danny Whitten, the original Crazy Horse guitar player and singer who's all over Early Daze, an album of songs from the beginning of Crazy Horse that I have been working on compiling recently. Danny was every bit the artist I am, but he died of a heroin OD in the early seventies. Every time I hear Pegi sing that song, it makes me tremendously sad. She sings it so beautifully, phrasing it to break my heart. She does it justice. You can see I have some unfinished business with Danny.

He strums his guitar while he speaks, looking out over the crowd. They’re quiet, listening. “I don’t know if you know this about me,” he says. “But I have a beautiful daughter. Her name is Rachel, and she’s the bravest person I know.” I gasp. “Oh!” Aurora says, taking my hand. Jake squeezes my other one. “She is, naturally, a genius,” he says, and the crowd laughs. “Recently she said something so clever and true that I couldn’t let it go. So I wrote this song for her. I’m going to call it ‘Double Negative.’ It’s a song that asks for her patience. I figure by the time she turns thirty I might figure out this fatherhood thing.” He closes his eyes and begins slapping out a bluesy rhythm line on his guitar. I can’t not love you, And I can’t not care I won’t take no for an answer, And I won’t bow to despair. I don’t stop hoping, But I won’t forget to say That you’re not wrong in anger, And I can’t wish that away. You don’t believe that I am true It took far too long for me to come through. But I am your double negative Where everything wrong turns right. You might say that I am trite But don’t fight me, girl, on this tonight. I am your double negative Where everything wrong turns right.

Physiological confirmation of such “filling in” by involuntary musical imagery has recently been obtained by William Kelley and his colleagues at Dartmouth, who used functional MRI to scan the auditory cortex while their subjects listened to familiar and unfamiliar songs in which short segments had been replaced by gaps of silence. The silent gaps embedded in familiar songs were not consciously noticed by their subjects, but the researchers observed that these gaps “induced greater activation in the auditory association areas than did silent gaps embedded in unknown songs; this was true for gaps in songs with lyrics and without lyrics.

the Hall of Offerings. Isaac motioned to a wall relief covered in hieroglyphic writing. "Let me show you something I discovered recently," Isaac said. "This hieroglyphic register is a song to Augustus, King of Egypt, heralding him as 'Lord of the Dance,' meaning 'Lord of Life.' I will translate: "The King of Egypt "Pharaoh comes to dance "He comes to sing "See how he dances "See how he sings… "I remember Isaac looked at me to gauge my reaction. In truth I was spellbound. He went on to say, 'The song of Augustus eventually spread to Medieval England where a carol, called "Lord of the Dance," was sung at Christmas and is sung to this day.

He went on thus to call over names celebrated in Scottish song, and most of which had recently received a romantic interest from his own pen. In fact, I saw a great part of the border country spread out before me, and could trace the scenes of those poems and romances which had, in a manner, bewitched the world. I gazed about me for a time with mute surprise, I may almost say with disappointment. I beheld a mere succession of gray waving hills, line beyond line, as far as my eye could reach; monotonous in their aspect, and so destitute of trees, that one could almost see a stout fly walking along their profile; and the far-famed Tweed appeared a naked stream, flowing between bare hills, without a tree or thicket on its banks; and yet, such had been the magic web of poetry and romance thrown over the whole, that it had a greater charm for me than the richest scenery I beheld in England. I could not help giving utterance to my thoughts. Scott hummed for a moment to himself, and looked grave; he had no idea of having his muse complimented at the expense of his native hills. "It may be partiality," said he, at length; "but to my eye, these gray hills and all this wild border country have beauties peculiar to themselves. I like the very nakedness of the land; it has something bold, and stern, and solitary about it. When I have been for some time in the rich scenery about Edinburgh, which is like ornamented garden land, I begin to wish myself back again among my own honest gray hills; and if I did not see the heather at least once a year, I think I should die!

In 1938, blues musician Lead Belly sang a song he wrote about “the Scottsboro boys,” a group of Black teenagers who were sent to jail after being falsely accused of raping two white women on a train (one of the women later admitted it was a made-up charge). After the song, Lead Belly talked about the case and advised fellow Black Americans “to stay woke—keep their eyes open.” Stay woke. The term has been a part of the Black American lexicon for a very long time. In more recent years, the term has evolved from the way Lead Belly was using it—warning Black people to stay alert to dangerous situations that might arise—to a broader meaning about staying aware of racist systems of oppression. After the release of Erykah Badu’s 2007 song Master Teacher, with a chorus that repeated the line “I stay woke,” the term exploded into the mainstream.

People who believe in fundamental and irreversible changes in human nature are themselves ahistorical and naive. If novelists know anything it’s that individual citizens are internally plural: they have within them the full range of behavioral possibilities. They are like complex musical scores from which certain melodies can be teased out and others ignored or suppressed, depending, at least in part, on who is doing the conducting. At this moment, all over the world — and most recently in America — the conductors standing in front of this human orchestra have only the meanest and most banal melodies in mind. Here in Germany you will remember these martial songs; they are not a very distant memory. But there is no place on earth where they have not been played at one time or another. Those of us who remember, too, a finer music must try now to play it, and encourage others, if we can, to sing along.

I find it impossible, therefore, to imagine a growing and maturing church or individual Christian doing without the Psalms. And that is why (to be frank) a fair amount of contemporary Christian music has worried me for some time. The last generation in the Western churches has seen an enormous explosion in “Christian music,” with hundreds of new songs written and sung, often with great devotion and energy. That is wonderful; like all new movements, it will no doubt need to shake down and sift out the wheat from the chaff, but one would much rather have all these new signs of life than the sterile repetition of stale traditions. Until very recently, though, the kind of traditions from which this new music has emerged, traditions that think of themselves as “biblical,” after all, would always have included solid doses of psalmody. If that has changed, the sooner it changes back the better, with, of course, all the resources of fresh musical treatments upon which to draw. To worship without using the Psalms is to risk planting seeds that will never take root.

Helene Hanff, an aspiring playwright who had been put to work in the Theatre Guild press office, remembered trying to generate some effective publicity for Away We Go! “This was, they told us, the damndest musical ever thought up for a sophisticated Broadway audience,” Hanff wrote. “It was so pure you could put it on at a church social. It opened with a middle-aged farm woman sitting alone on a bare stage churning butter, and from then on it got cleaner.”16 It was the kind of Americana that Larry Hart distrusted. But at the New Haven tryout he tried to keep an open mind. Of the songs in Away We Go!’s first act, five of them—“Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’,” “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top,” “Many a New Day,” “People Will Say We’re in Love,” and “Out of My Dreams”—were destined to become instant classics, with “All Er Nuthin’” and “Oklahoma!” delighting the audience in the second act. But Larry wasn’t so delighted. He might have regarded “We know we belong to the land” as a professionally crafted line, as resonant to recent immigrants as to Mayflower descendants; but “The land we belong to is grand”?

The late Fred Rogers, beloved host of the Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood television show, wrote many beautiful songs for children that hold great truths for adults as well. In “I Like to Be Told,” he writes of every child’s desire to be told “if it’s going to hurt,” if a parent is going away, or if something will be new or difficult, because “I will trust you more and more” each time these things come true. We never outgrow our desire to be told the truth. A fellow writer told me the story of waking up one morning when she was a child and being told she wouldn’t be going to kindergarten that day but tot the hospital for eye surgery. Her suitcase was already packed. She was old enough to understand that this meant her parents had withheld information from her. The memory of being betrayed is more painful than the memory of the surgery itself. Compare this with a young boy who recently faced heart surgery. He asked his grandfather if it was going to hurt. His grandfather answered with honest that engendered hope: “Yes, for a while. But every day the pain should get less and less, and it means you’ll be getting better and stronger.

Wishing only to preserve oneself is the expression of distress, or of a restriction on the proper, fundamental impulse of life which aims at the extension of power, and with this intention often enough calls into question and sacrifices self-preservation. We regard it as symptomatic when an individual philosopher, as, for example, the consumptive Spinoza, sees and has to see the decisive factor precisely in the so-called impulse towards self-preservation – they were merely men in distress. The fact that our modern natural sciences have entangled themselves to such an extent in Spinoza’s dogma (most recently and in the crudest manner in Darwinism, with its incredibly one-sided doctrine of the ‘struggle for existence’), is probably due to the origin of most naturalists: they belong in this respect to the ‘people’, their ancestors were poor and humble folk who were intimately acquainted with the difficulty of making ends meet. The whole of English Darwinism is reminiscent of the stifling air of English overpopulation, like the vulgar smell of hardship and overcrowding. But as a naturalist, one should emerge from one’s human corner; and in nature distress does not hold sway, but rather abundance, even an absurd extravagance. The struggle for existence is but an exception, a temporary restriction on the life-will; the struggle whether great or small everywhere turns on predominance, on growth and expansion, on power, in accordance with the will to power, which is precisely the will of life.

For the bus ride, which Delaney estimated would be ninety minutes, she had prepared a mix of happy journeying music, which she activated as they pulled out of the campus gate. The first song was by Otis Redding, and the first message came via her phone. Woman-hater, it said, with a link to an unsigned and evidence-less post hinting that he had been unkind to an ex-girlfriend who he’d met shortly before the bay and the dock and the sitting. Thanks for the early-morning pick-me-up! the writer said, meaning that Delaney had ruined the day and tacitly endorsed Redding’s newly alleged misogyny. Delaney skipped to the next song, Lana Del Rey’s “High by the Beach,” and then quickly figured it was too big a risk so skipped ahead. The third song, the Muppets’ “Movin’ Right Along,” was unknown to most on the bus, and survived its three-minute length, during which a handful of passengers furiously tried to find a reason the song was complicit in evil committed or implied. Delaney skipped the next song, by Neil Diamond, thinking any Jewish singer dubious in light of the Israeli sandwich debacle, skipped songs six and seven (from Thriller), briefly considered the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” but then remembered Phil Spector, and so finally settled on a young Ghanian rapper she’d recently discovered. His first song was hunted down quickly in a hail of rhetorical buckshot—as a teen, the rapper had zinged a borderline joke about his female trigonometry teacher—so Delaney turned off the shared music, leaving everyone, for the next eighty-one minutes, to their earbuds and the safety of their individualized solitude.

What does a mind that is focused on hope look like? I read recently about a woman who had been diagnosed with cancer and was given three months to live. Her doctor told her to make preparations to die, so she contacted her pastor and told him how she wanted things arranged for her funeral service—which songs she wanted to have sung, what Scriptures should be read, what words should be spoken—and that she wanted to be buried with her favorite Bible. But before he left, she called out to him, “One more thing.” “What?” “This is important. I want to be buried with a fork in my right hand.” The pastor did not know what to say. No one had ever made such a request before. So she explained. “In all my years going to church functions, whenever food was involved, my favorite part was when whoever was cleaning dishes of the main course would lean over and say, You can keep your fork. “It was my favorite part because I knew that it meant something great was coming. It wasn’t Jell-O. It was something with substance—cake or pie—biblical food. “So I just want people to see me there in my casket with a fork in my hand, and I want them to wonder, What’s with the fork? Then I want you to tell them, Something better is coming. Keep your fork.” The pastor hugged the woman good-bye. And soon after, she died. At the funeral service people saw the dress she had chosen, saw the Bible she loved, and heard the songs she loved, but they all asked the same question: “What’s with the fork?” The pastor explained that this woman, their friend, wanted them to know that for her—or for anyone who dies in Christ—this is not a day of defeat. It is a day of celebration. The real party is just starting. Something better is coming.

On her second screen, there were the number of messages sent by other staffers that day, 1,192, and the number of those messages that she’d read, 239, and the number to which she’d responded, 88. There was the number of recent invitations to Circle company events, 41, and the number she’d responded to, 28. There was the number of overall visitors to the Circle’s sites that day, 3.2 billion, and the number of pageviews, 88.7 billion. There was the number of friends in Mae’s OuterCircle, 762, and outstanding requests by those wanting to be her friend, 27. There were the number of zingers she was following, 10,343, and the number following her, 18,198. There was the number of unread zings, 887. There was the number of zingers suggested to her, 12,862. There was the number of songs in her digital library, 6,877, number of artists represented, 921, and based on her tastes, the number of artists recommended to her: 3,408. There was the number of images in her library, 33,002, and number of images recommended to her, 100,038. There was the temperature inside the building, 70, and the temperature outside, 71. There was the number of staffers on campus that day, 10,981, and number of visitors to campus that day, 248. Mae had news alerts set for 45 names and subjects, and each time any one of them was mentioned by any of the news feeds she favored, she received a notice. That day there were 187. She could see how many people had viewed her profile that day, 210, and how much time on average they spent: 1.3 minutes. If she wanted, of course, she could go deeper, and see precisely what each person had viewed. Her health stats added a few dozen more numbers, each of them giving her a sense of great calm and control. She knew her heart rate and knew it was right. She knew her step count, almost 8,200 that day, and knew that she could get to 10,000 with ease.

There is a mixture of humor with drama in this part of the ceremony as well. When the old man staggered out of the house I was shocked at how spastic he had suddenly become (he had been ill recently), and at how cruel it seemed to laugh at him, as everyone made fun of his erratic movements. When my understanding of the ceremonial role of old people improved, I realized that he was just as much doing his part for the ceremony by staggering around and exaggerating his infirmity as the younger men were doing theirs by stamping hard, marching in a straight line, exaggerating their strenght and shouting their songs. He was a member of the old people's "clown" age grade. The Suyá say a ceremony without clowns would not be as much fun, and would not make people as euphoric.

To the chagrin of the Aussies equipped with recently delivered M1A1s, the aging Aussie Leopard 1’s rifled 105mm gun outranged them, and what was even worse the bloody pommy Challenger and Chieftain 120mm rifled guns were the kings of the battlefield.

Director: Saravana Rajan Producer: Dayanidhi Azhagiri Written : Saravana Rajan Starring: Jai,Swati Reddy Music: Yuvan Shankar Raja Cinematography: Venkatesh S. Release Date: Jan 24, 2014 Editing: Praveen K. L, N. B. Srikanth Director Saravana Rajan’s debut comedy thriller ‘Vadacurry’ features actors Swati Reddy and Jai in lead role. ‘Vadacurry’ is produced by Dhayanidhi Alagiri with Yuvan Shankar Raja’s music. Bollywood actress Sunny Leone has shaken her legs for ‘Vadacurry’ Tamil film’s dream song with actor Jai in Bangkok. The shooting of the song was held in December 2013. It’s a dream sequence of Jai’s character in the ‘Vadacurry’ where, Sunny will be grooving with him. Sunny was given half-sari, bangles and anklets to portray a typical south Indian look in this song. However, the hot diva loved trying these accessories to shake her legs for her debut film in Kollywood ‘Vadacurry’. ‘Vadacurry’ Tamil movie’s cinematography is handled by Venkatesh. ‘Vadacurry’ team started rolling on floors from August 19, 2013. Interestingly, ‘Vadacurry’ Tamil movie’s music composer Yuvan Shankar Raja is cousin of director Saravana Rajan. Director Saravana Rajan has followed the steps of his tutor Venkat Prabhu in coining food names as title for his movie ‘Vadacurry’ that matched with Venkat Prabhu’s recent release ‘Biriyani’. The charming beauty Anusha Dhayanidhi has made a debut as costume designer in ‘Vadacurry’. Anusha Dhayanidhi has transformed the looks of female lead Swathi in ‘Vadacurry’ Tamil film. It should be noted that ‘Subramaniyapuram’ pairs, who had portrayed good chemistry have joined this comedy entertainer ‘Vadacurry’. However, ‘Vadacurry’ Tamil film is ready to be served on 24January, 2014 to give a punch of full-on comedy with its taste and essence.

One by one, in a methodical clockwise direction, each person gave their individual reaction to my playing of the song. The first person said he was soothed by the melody, the second that she was inspired by the words. The third person said she had felt touched as it reminded her of someone precious that she loved. And on around it went, each person telling of a different need that was met, or another way he had been touched by my song. Dr. Rosenberg said he had felt inspired because I had mucked up the song a little in one place and had kept playing and finished it. When everyone had shared, strong feelings began to pour into my body and up into my throat. Gratitude and relief? No. Joy? No. Sorrow. Great sorrow, for all the years that I had not been playing. For all the people that could have been touched or inspired, had I given them the chance. For all the attention and connection I could have received but did not. As the sorrow eventually subsided like a passing rainstorm, warm powerful rays of sunny resolution began to radiate in my heart. It was a resolution and a clarity of commitment to myself to “perfect my selfishness.” In a moment, I saw how playing the miserable martyr’s role, sacrificing my passion to avoid disturbing other people, had too high a price. It also ripped other people off, by denying them what I had to give them. I swore then and there that I was not going to do that to me again. I Don’t Want To Do That To Me Again by Ruth Bebermeyer No use wasting life saying that I should have known better. No use wasting time regretting what has been. I just know I felt uneasy and I couldn’t settle down, Like my picture couldn’t fit into that frame. And I don’t, don’t want to do that to me again. No use wishing now that I had not had to learn this way. No use wasting time regretting what has been. I just know I wasn’t easy and I wasn’t who I am, But I guess I had to do it to see plain. And I don’t want to do that to me again. I just want to go on singing the same tune I’m playing. I want my self and my doing all the same. And I want to walk in rhythm to the beat of my own soul. When I’m out of step with me I’m into pain. And I don’t don’t want to do that to me again. The Treasure of Transparency Recently I held a potluck dinner at my house for a group of friends, most of whom had been learning and practicing the techniques of Nonviolent Communication. After we had finished eating, a woman asked if the group would like to hear a story she wrote. At first no one answered, but then a couple of people asked how long the story was and whether the essence of it could just be told to them. Finally an agreement was reached about how the gift of the story could be given so that the group’s needs for connecting with each other and relaxing at the party could also be met. I was struck by how rare it is in this culture for individuals

My parents always told me that life is about asking questions which I didn’t understand that until more recently. See the truth is like life is like a collection of questions really if you think about it. Or at least the ones we choose to acknowledge. See within those questions that we choose to acknowledge we answer them for ourselves because we have the need to and in those answers I believe that we find our own meaning, we find our own definition, we define what is we stand for, you know what I’m saying; who we are as people, as individuals, what we believe in. And that’s how we celebrate our individuality. Now you would think that individuality would separate us but on the contrary the truth is we all answer pretty much the same basic questions for ourselves, they’re not complicated questions you know. They’re very simple, basic universal questions and that’s why I wrote this song

Come Let Us Worship Come, let us bow down in worship, let us kneel before the LORD our Maker. —PSALM 95:6     A recent point of frustration, debate, and tension in many churches has been about defining worship and agreeing what it should look like. Older Christians are confused because of changes made to the style of worship. They wonder whatever happened to the old hymns that were so beloved. They knew the page numbers and all the old verses by heart. Today there are no hymnals, the organs have been silenced, and guitars, drums, and cymbals have taken over. The choir and their robes have been abandoned, and now we have five to seven singers on stage leading songs. We stand for 30 minutes at a time singing song lyrics that we aren’t familiar with from a large screen. What’s happening? If the church doesn’t have these components, the young people leave and go to where it’s happening. Are we going to let the form of worship divide our churches? I hope not! The origins of many of the different expressions of worship can be found in the Psalms, which portray worship as an act of the whole person, not just the mental sphere. The early founders established ways to worship based on what they perceived after reading this great book of the Bible. Over the centuries, Christian worship has taken many different forms, involving various expressions and postures on the part of churchgoers. The Hebrew word for “worship” literally means “to kneel” or “to bow down.” The act of worship is the gesture of humbling oneself before a mighty authority. The Psalms also call upon us to “sing to the LORD, bless His name” (96:2 NASB). Music has always played a large part in the sacred act of worship. Physical gestures and movements are also mentioned in the Psalms. Lifting our hands before God signifies our adoration of Him. Clapping our hands shows our celebration before God. Some worshipers rejoice in His presence with tambourines and dancing (see Psalm 150:4). To worship like the psalmist is to obey Jesus’ command to “love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength” (Mark 12:30). There are many more insights for worship in the book of Psalms: • God’s gifts of instruments and vocal music can be used to help us worship (47:1; 81:1-4). • We can appeal to God for help, and we can thank Him for His deliverance (4:3; 17:1-5). • Difficult times should not prevent us from praising God (22:23- 24; 102:1-2; 140:4-8).

Human cultural supremacy over the surface of the earth is recent and not quite complete. If we could have listened at lower frequencies, below the limits of the human ear, we would have heard rumbles and groans of other whales—the finback and the blue—their songs competing in the lowest frequency bands with the recent sound of ships. Could these be other nonhuman cultures?

You know, if I were to write a song dedicated to the lost, bumbling souls we all affectionately refer to as recent college graduates, I wouldn’t kick that song off with a directive to wear sunscreen. I would kick it off with a warning to never, ever wear slacks. Don’t buy them, don’t speak their name, don’t look them directly in the eye. They will burn you. There are ways to look professional without dressing like a high school principal who got lost on her way back to 1983.

April 5   |   Matthew 7:11 At a recent birthday party I overheard some kids singing Matthew 7:7. The verse was fine, but the chorus was a problem. Ask and it will be given to you Seek and you will find Knock and the door will be opened to you. You gotta ask! (clap clap clap) You gotta seek! (clap clap clap) You gotta knock! (clap clap clap) Now, I’m all for helping kids remember Bible verses. If I’d been made to sing songs like this as a child, I’d probably know more of my Bible today. But this song is a particularly egregious example of focusing on the wrong part of the verse and letting law crowd out gospel. Matthew 7:7 is not primarily about what we have to do; it’s about what God has promised to do. When we focus on the imperatives of the verse (what we are to do) instead of the indicatives (what is being done, in this case by God), we reflect a self-focused faith. And while the imperatives of Matthew 7:7 are undeniably there, the verse still isn’t about asking, seeking, and knocking as much as it is about receiving, finding, and being welcomed. I’d prefer if the chorus went something like this: He’s gonna give! (clap clap clap) He’s gonna show! (clap clap clap) He’s gonna hug! (clap clap clap) After all, Matthew 7:11 says, “If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!” This little section is about the gift giver! It’s not about what the receiver has to do to get the gift. We’re evil, and even we know how to give good gifts. Our God is gracious, and He has given us the greatest gift of all: His Son, Jesus Christ, who is an answered petition, a revealed treasure, and an open door. Let’s sing about that.

Lydia? Do you feel any sort of remorse or revulsion for what we have to do to survive?” Lydia frowned as Rafael Villar’s words came back to her. Some of our kind feel that we are monsters; Deveril is one of those. Did Vincent truly believe he was a monster? He’d lived for nearly two centuries. She couldn’t imagine someone existing with such profound self-loathing for so long. Her chin lifted. No matter, she was determined to change his mind. She made sure Vincent heard the conviction of her words. “It doesn’t hurt them. We take only a pint or two at most. In fact, they seem to be quite euphoric after we’re done with them.” Lydia bit her lip. In the case of her most recent meal, “euphoric” was an understatement. Vincent nodded, though he appeared reluctant to believe her. “So you do not regret my Changing you?” “I am finding great pleasure in this existence.” Lydia willed him to see and hear the truth in her words. “My keener vision has revealed untold beauty in the night. Don’t you see it?” With a sweep of her hand, she encompassed the brilliant full moon, the silvery clouds, and the cleverly lit trees surrounding them. “I can smell the perfume of a hundred different flowers. My ears delight to hear a nightingale song, the music of human laughter. I’ve never before felt so alive.” The

I believe that information technologies, especially well-designed, purposeful ones, empower and renew us and serve to amplify our reach and our abilities. The ensuing connectedness dissolves away intermediary layers of inefficiency and indirection. Some of the most visible recent examples of this dissolving of layers are the transformations we have seen in music, movies and books. Physical books and the bookstores they inhabited have been rapidly disappearing, as have physical compact discs, phonograph records, videotapes and the stores that housed them. Yet there is more music than ever before, more books and more movies. Their content got separated from their containers and got housed in more convenient, more modular vessels, which better tie into our lives, in more consumable ways. In the process, layers of inefficiency got dissolved. By putting 3000 songs in our pockets, the iPod liberated our music from the housings that confined it. The iPhone has a high-definition camera within it, along with a bunch of services for sharing, distributing and publishing pictures, even editing them — services that used to be inside darkrooms and studios. 3D printing is an even more dramatic example of this transformation. The capabilities and services provided by workshops and factories are now embodied within a printer that can print things like tools and accessories, food and musical instruments. A remarkable musical flute was printed recently at MIT, its sound indistinguishable from that produced by factory-built flutes of yesterday.

The most noteworthy knock-Shaq-on-his-rear addition took place on June 26, 2002, when the Houston Rockets used the first pick in the NBA draft to select Yao Ming, the 7-foot-6, 310-pound center who had recently averaged 38.9 points and 20.2 rebounds per game in the playoffs with the Shanghai Sharks of the Chinese Basketball Association. Though he was just 21 and unfamiliar with high-caliber competition, Yao’s arrival was considered a direct challenge to O’Neal’s reign as the NBA’s mightiest big man. Sure, Shaq was tall. But he wasn’t this tall. Within weeks, a song titled simply “Yao Ming” was being played on Houston radio stations, and Steve Francis, the Rockets’ superstar guard, was being introduced to audiences as “Yao Ming’s teammate.” There was talk—only half in jest—of a Ming dynasty. Put simply, the NBA’s 28 other franchises were doing their all to shove the Lakers off their perch. If that meant copying elements of the triangle offense (as many teams attempted to do), so be it. If that meant adding Mutombo or Clark, so be it. If that meant importing China’s greatest center, so be it. And if that meant throwing punches—well, let’s go.

The people who ask me about the “failure of multiculturalism” mean to suggest that not only has a political ideology failed but that human beings themselves have changed and are now fundamentally incapable of living peacefully together despite their many differences. In this argument it is the writer who is meant to be the naive child, but I maintain that people who believe in fundamental and irreversible changes in human nature are themselves ahistorical and naive. If novelists know anything it’s that individual citizens are internally plural: they have within them the full range of behavioral possibilities. They are like complex musical scores from which certain melodies can be teased out and others ignored or suppressed, depending, at least in part, on who is doing the conducting. At this moment, all over the world—and most recently in America—the conductors standing in front of this human orchestra have only the meanest and most banal melodies in mind. Here in Germany you will remember these martial songs; they are not a very distant memory. But there is no place on earth where they have not been played at one time or another. Those of us who remember, too, a finer music must try now to play it, and encourage others, if we can, to sing along.

Sending you all a loving hug, Just don't forget me. The memories are still fresh, I so wish with you to be. We might be a distance apart, Living amidst a crisis. The happy vibes of recent past, In this desert are an oasis. Don't ever let thy hopes fade, Look up at the sky, a healthy hue. One thing I promise my friends, My heart will always be with you. The giggles and the friendly jabs, Those loud laughs over food and wine. They are my antidotes in need, Even the Virus wonders how am I fine. I am just waiting for to meet again, Life will bring back that time. Song of heart I cannot sing, But the words are there to rhyme. Nature knows how to correct us, Earth is saying, remember me. Sending you all a loving hug, Just don't forget me!

There were nineteen skulls. The oldest was more than three thousand years old; the youngest a mere century and a half. The most recent were also the smallest; a matched pair no bigger than mastiff’s skulls, and oddly misshapen, all that remained of the last two hatchlings born on Dragonstone. They were the last of the Targaryen dragons, perhaps the last dragons anywhere, and they had not lived very long.

More recent Gemini graduates, Stafford and I were the newcomers, but Tom seemed to be a swifter study than I. He had been number one in his class in electrical engineering at the Naval Academy, and he sopped up wiring diagrams with the same ease with which some teenage girls memorize the words of popular songs.

To suit the variety of moods that they experience, they listen to a range of music genres. People are often curious about their taste in music, especially the extent of the diversity. One minute they are listening to classical music and the next hardcore rap! The lyrics to a song can have a powerful effect on an empath, especially if it relates to something they have recently experienced. It is advised that empaths listen to music without lyrics to avoid sending their emotions into a spin.

The next time you meet new people, ask them what they do for fun. Watch their eyes light up as they talk about the hike they took in the forest, the picture they are painting, the song they are writing, or the river they recently kayaked. It creates a completely different dynamic.

I stepped out of the car. Mothers and nannies ambled by, pushing complicated baby strollers that fold and shift and rock and play songs and lean back and lean forward and hold more than one kid, plus an assortment of diapers, wipes, Gerber snacks, juice boxes (for the older sibling), change of clothing, bottles, even car first-aid kits. I knew all this from my own practice (being on Medicaid did not preclude one from affording the high-end Peg Perego strollers), and I found this spectacle of bland normalcy cohabiting in the same realm as my recent ordeal to be something of an elixir. I

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He had what young and/or terrible people were recently calling swag.

Hollywood was called Tinseltown for a reason and I was caught up in its glitter. My friend Ken seemed to know everyone and once took me to the NBC Studios in Burbank, where he introduced me to Steve Allen. “Steverino,” as he was known by friends, must have thought that I wanted to get into show business and promised that if I applied myself, I would go places. I hadn’t really given show business much thought, but it sounded good to me. However, I’m glad that I didn’t count on his promise of becoming a star, because that was the end of it. I never saw Steve Allen again, other than on television, and I guess that’s just the way it was in Hollywood. Later Steve Allen starred in NBC’s The Tonight Show, which in more recent times has been hosted by Jack Paar, Johnny Carson, Jay Leno and now by Jimmy Fallon. Steve Allen had a rider in his contract that whenever he was introduced as a guest, the introduction would include: “And now our next guest is world-renowned recording artist, actor, producer, playwright, best-selling author, composer of thousands of songs, Emmy winning comic genius and entertainer – Steve Allen.” He was a funny guy and he would crack me up, but more than that, he would frequently crack himself up. Steve was loved or hated by people. It was said that he was enormously talented, and if you didn’t believe that, just ask him. Jack Paar, who followed Steve on The Tonight Show, once said, “Steve Allen has claimed to have written over 1,000 songs; name one???” The truth is that he did write a huge number of songs, including the 1963 Grammy award-winning composition, The Gravy Waltz. He wrote about 50 books, one of which is Steve Allen’s Private Joke File, published in 2000, just prior to his death in that same year. He also has two stars on the “Hollywood Walk of Fame,” one for radio and one for TV. Say what you want…. He cracked up at least two people with his humor, himself and me!

CHRIS CAFFERY:  I'd have to say that everybody's favorite old Scorpions song as a guitar player is "The Sails of Charon." That song is the one that you heard and you were like, "What the heck is this?!" Because it was trippy, it was different. The funny thing is if you ever look at the old interviews that Yngwie Malmsteen did, he never credited Uli - until recently. He used to say, "Oh, I did not know who Uli Roth was." And it's like, "Bullshit you didn't! You stole everything you ever did from him and Blackmore!" [Laughs]

The Horned Master governs the generative powers of the kingdom of the beasts, the raw forces of life, death and renewal which sustains the natural world.” Nigel A Jackson. The Call of the Horned Piper: 38 The Art and Craft of the Witches is found at the crossroad, where this world and the other side meets and all possibility become reality. This simple fact is often forgotten as one rushes to the Sabbath or occupies oneself with formalities of ritual. The cross marks the four quarters, the four elements, the path of Sun, Moon and Stars. The cross was fused or confused with the Greek staurus, meaning ‘rod’, ‘rood’ or ‘pole’. Various forms of phallic worship are simply, veneration for the cosmic point of possibility and becoming. It is at the crossroads we will gain all or lose all and it is natural that it is at the crossroads we gain perspective. The crossroad is a place of choice, the spirit-denizens of the crossroads are said to be tricky and unreliable and it is of course where we find the Devil. One of the most famous legends of recent times concerns the blues-man Robert Johnson (1911– 1938). He claimed that, one night, just before midnight he had gone to the crossroads. He took out his guitar and played, whereupon a big black guy appeared, tuned his guitar, played a song backwards and handed it back.2 This incident altered Johnson’s playing and his finest and most everlasting compositions were the fruit of the few years of life left to him. This legend tells us how he needed to bury himself at the crossroads, offering himself to the powers dwelling there. Business done with the Devil is said to give him the upper hand. The ill omens and malefica associated with such deals is present in Johnson’s story. He got fame and women, but he died less than three years later before he reached thirty. His body was found poisoned at a crossroads, the murderer’s identity a mystery. Around the Mississippi no less than three tombs carry the name of Robert Leroy Johnson. The image of the Devil remains one of threat, blessing, beauty and opportunity. Where we find the Devil we find danger, unpredictability and chaos. If he offers a deal we know we are in for a complicated bargain. The Devil says that change is good, that we need movement in order to progress. His world is about cunning and ordeal entwined like the serpents of past and future on the pole of ascent. It is to the crossroads we go to make decisions. It is at the crossroads we set the course for the journey. It is at the crossroads we confront ourselves and realize our

He turned to his side, with the kind of creepily glazed look our eyeballs make when we’re alone in a room, brushing our teeth, chewing, or wiping our ass. His blanket was still wet with warm semen. He thought about his father. Then he remembered he needed to wash the clothes in the laundromat. His semen dripped and he thought about bird feeding. There was one bird who loved his safflower seeds. He ground his teeth and imagined what it was like to be born in Africa. He reflected on his most recent online English tutor lesson learning from a native speaker. He was fluent, but it paid to feel like you had a friend somewhere. Then he thought of peanut butter. The thoughts of the human mind transition so quickly that it only ever seems strange when we say it aloud to someone else. Otherwise, we’re all secretly freaks with our mouths shut. He laid there ugly.

Why were so many songs collected in the north-east, for example? In part, no doubt, the answer has to do with the activities of collectors; but the richness of the north-east in songs compared with the barren song terrain of the Lothians strongly suggests that differences in rural social organisation have explanatory value. We need to get away from simply counterposing 'lowland' to 'highland'. We need to see the enormous diversity in social arrangements within Lowland Scotland, even in recent times; and to analyse that diversity case by case without trying to smash it into a spurious shape with the intellectual cudgel of 'improvement'.

we’ve learned anything recently, it’s that life is short and its impact isn’t measured in years. Buy a piano, Eason. Write the songs. Be the star. Flip the entire music industry on its head.

The show also gave me the opportunity to sing its theme song, “Follow Me,” which was cowritten by my sister. I recently produced and recorded a modern version of the song. In an effort to assuage the fans, I asked many of my original castmates to shoot a video for the song’s reboot. It was tricky because we did a one-day shoot complicated by the protocols of COVID-19. The shooting schedule for that day was insane, with temperature checks and sanitation requirements. Once we all got back into a room together, the years apart vanished. We arrived as adults but performing brought us back to 2004. The release of the song and video spurred new rumors about a Zoey 101 reunion show. I am excited at the prospect of working on another Zoey 101 project, whether that be a long-format movie or series. The cast is eager to reunite and bring the characters into the present. We have been in talks to reinvent the series. Producers and writers have shared some concepts that sound intriguing. Hopefully, a modern-day version will go into production soon.

Langmore’s discovery was indeed profound. It proved that female song wasn’t some recent evolutionary kink, found only in the tropics. Female songbirds had always sung. What’s changed is that, in some northern temperate regions, in the more recently evolved families of songbird, females have, for some reason, ceased singing. Which is a radically different evolutionary scenario than the framework proposed by Darwin.

Faith is belief based on spiritual conviction instead of proof. You could say that the nature of my convictions has changed recently.

Olar Ethil, who was this recent ascendant?’ ‘Twice brought into the world of worship. Once, by a tribal people, and named Iskar Jarak. A bringer of wisdom, a saviour. And the other time, as the commander of a company of soldiers—promised to ascension by a song woven by a Tanno Spiritwalker. Yes, the entire company ascended upon death.’ ‘Soldiers?’ Errastas was frowning. ‘Ascended?’ Confused. Frightened by the notion. ‘And what name did he possess among these ascended soldiers?’ Mael asked. ‘Whiskeyjack. He was a Malazan.

Alison Wood Brooks, an associate professor at Harvard Business School, had a different notion of how to handle nervousness. In a series of three studies, she subjected groups of people to experiences that most everyone would find nerve-racking: completing “a very difficult IQ test” administered “under time pressure”; delivering, on the spot, “a persuasive public speech about ‘why you are a good work partner’ ”; and most excruciating of all, belting out an 80s pop song (“Don’t Stop Believin’,” by Journey). Before beginning the activity, participants were to direct themselves to stay calm, or to tell themselves that they were excited. Reappraising nervousness as excitement yielded a noticeable difference in performance. The IQ test takers scored significantly higher. The speech givers came across as more persuasive, competent, and confident. Even the singers performed more passably (as judged by the Nintendo Wii Karaoke Revolution program they used). All reported genuinely feeling the pleasurable emotion of excitement—a remarkable shift away from the unpleasant discomfort such activities might be expected to engender. In a similar fashion, we can choose to reappraise debilitating “stress” as productive “coping.” A 2010 study carried out with Boston-area undergraduates looked at what happens when people facing a stressful experience are informed about the positive effects of stress on our thinking—that is, the way it can make us more alert and more motivated. Before taking the GRE, the admissions exam for graduate school, one group of students was given the following message to read: “People think that feeling anxious while taking a standardized test will make them do poorly on the test. However, recent research suggests that arousal doesn’t hurt performance on these tests and can even help performance. People who feel anxious during a test might actually do better. This means that you shouldn’t feel concerned if you do feel anxious while taking today’s GRE test. If you find yourself feeling anxious, simply remind yourself that your arousal could be helping you do well.” A second group received no such message before taking the exam. Three months later, when the students’ GRE scores were released, the students who had been encouraged to reappraise their feelings of stress scored an average of 65 points higher.

The songwriters had been making a fortune recently writing sentimental songs about the passing of the Negro.

Are these song books approved?” asked Darcy Puig, the regional Inclusiveness Inspector. About 24 and a recent graduate of Notre Dame, where she had majored in Oppression Studies, she had come to Jasper’s First Baptist Church as part of her regular inspections of licensed religious organizations. She was squat and had dyed black hair cut in a bowl shape. A stainless steel spike protruded from her lower lip.

By March 1948 Sheikh Abdullah was the most important man in the Valley. Hari Singh was still the state’s ceremonial head – now called ‘sadr-i-riyasat’ – but he had no real powers. The government of India completely shut him out of the UN deliberations. Their man, as they saw it, was Abdullah. Only he, it was felt, could ‘save’ Kashmir for the Union. At this stage Abdullah himself was inclined to stress the ties between Kashmir and India. In May 1948 he organized a week-long ‘freedom’ celebration in Srinagar, to which he invited the leading lights of the Indian government. The events on the calendar included folk songs and poetry readings, the remembrance of martyrs and visits to refugee camps. The Kashmiri leader commended the ‘patriotic morale of our own people and the gallant fighting forces of the Indian Union’. ‘Our struggle’, said Abdullah, ‘is not merely the affair of the Kashmir people, it is the war of every son and daughter of India.’59 On the first anniversary of Indian independence Abdullah sent a message to the leading Madras weekly, Swatantra. The message sought to unite north and south, mountain and coast, and, above all, Kashmir and India. It deserves to be printed in full: Through the pages of SWATANTRA I wish to send my message of fraternity to the people of the south. Far back in the annals of India the south and north met in the land of Kashmir. The great Shankaracharya came to Kashmir to spread his dynamic philosophy but here he was defeated in argument by a Panditani. This gave rise to the peculiar philosophy of Kashmir – Shaivism. A memorial to the great Shankaracharya in Kashmir stands prominent on the top of the Shankaracharya Hill in Srinagar. It is a temple containing the Murti of Shiva. More recently it was given to a southerner to take the case of Kashmir to the United Nations and, as the whole of India knows, with the doggedness and tenacity that is so usual to the southerner, he defended Kashmir. We in Kashmir expect that we shall continue to receive support and sympathy from the people of the south and that some day when we describe the extent of our country we shall use the phrase ‘from Kashmir to Cape Comorin’.60

end up doing, the places and people they decided against, all defined them as much as anything else, in the way negative space defines a photo or a song. The lives they didn’t lead were there, too, always with them. Only recently did he begin to see the shape those choices had made.

What fascinates me about the app, in particular, is its ability to hear a bird in my yard, which also has constant white noise from the freeway, the intermittent revving of engines (it’s recently popular in my area to remove mufflers, so that’s fun), and the regular passing by of planes from our nearby airport. Engine after engine roars around my house, and yet I tap “sound ID” and the app tunes in to just the songs of the birds, hiding in plain sight in the branches nearby. Anchoring to a God who is with us is about finding the spiritual equivalent of Merlin Bird ID. It’s about the practices, habits, or rhythms that help us notice the music of God’s nearness amid the din of daily life. Like the birds in my yard, God is always there, and yet without tuning myself in to God’s presence, I’m liable to go long stretches not hearing the song of love that’s calling to me. How

So in reality there was just one functioning channel, which came on at around 5 p.m., shutting down at 11 p.m. At seven o’clock, there was a news program for twenty-five minutes, almost exclusively about Kim Jong-il. There was no live film, just old photographs of him visiting factories, and the newscaster would read, verbatim, whatever he had supposedly said on those occasions. Next there was a thirty-minute music program, in which the lyrics scrolled across the screen karaoke style. The songs had titles like “Defend the Headquarters of Revolution,” which described the North Korean people as “bombs and bullets.” Then there was a slot for a drama or film, followed by another news program on the more recent movements of Kim Jong-il. This was the news that my students had mentioned watching each night. There were, of course, no commercials, but the news was sometimes interrupted by Kim Jong-il quotations that filled the screen.

I was speaking to a brand-new Christian who told me about a cocktail party he went to recently. Some of Henry’s friends were a little perplexed by his “finding religion”. One of them said, “Why on earth would you go to church?” Henry threw it straight back at him: “Come with me on Sunday and you can see for yourself!” That is a believer who enjoys his church service! And why wouldn’t he? It was a church service that hooked him in the first place. Henry had not attended church since the enforced chapel services of his Catholic school days. But one day his wife, Sandra, decided she wanted to take the kids to Sunday school-she had been invited to the church by a local school mum. Sandra went and loved it and within a few months found herself trusting in Christ. Naturally, she asked Henry to come along. Reluctantly, he did, and to his surprise he too loved the experience. He couldn’t put his finger on it but something about the singing and the prayers and the preaching (and the people) captivated him. He says it was an hour of depth and solace in an otherwise full and frantic life. Henry came back again and again. He soon found himself joining in with the songs and the prayers and finding that he really meant it. Christ had become real to him. Henry and Sandra have not looked back. They are among the most regular members of my church and remain eager to throw down the challenge to their friends and family: “Come with me on Sunday and you can see for yourself!

Most of what we think of as traditional or natural gender roles are actually constructed by our society, and often almost totally arbitrary. For instance, our culture is actually the exception for thinking that it’s unmanly to cry. Japanese samurai, medieval heroes, and even Beowulf himself cried like babies throughout their adventures. As recently as the nineteenth century, male tears were actually celebrated as a sign of honesty, integrity, and strength. And not in the “You’re brave enough to show your weakness” way, but just as a symbol that you actually gave a crap. Odysseus (the guy who killed a Cyclops and frickin’ won the Trojan War) would break down into tears periodically, at least once just because he listened to an emotional song. 3.D

is the strength of the songwriting. Dark Side contained strong, powerful songs. The overall idea that linked those songs together – the pressures of modern life – found a universal response, and continues to capture people’s imagination. The lyrics had depth, and had a resonance people could easily relate to, and were clear and simple enough for non-native-English speakers to understand, which must have been a factor in its international success. And the musical quality spearheaded by David’s guitar and voice and Rick’s keyboards established a fundamental Pink Floyd sound. We were comfortable with the music, which had had time to mature and gestate, and evolve through live performances – later on we had to stop previewing work live as the quality of the recording equipment being smuggled into gigs reached near-studio standards. The additional singers and Dick Parry’s sax gave the whole record an extra commercial sheen. In addition, the sonic quality of the album was state of the art – courtesy of the skills of Alan Parsons and Chris Thomas. This is particularly important, because at the time the album came out, hi-fi stereo equipment had only recently become a mainstream consumer item, an essential fashion accessory for the 1970s home. As a result, record buyers were particularly aware of the effects of stereo and able to appreciate any album that made the most of its possibilities. Dark Side had the good fortune to become one of the definitive test records that people could use to show off the quality of their hi-fi system. The packaging for the album by Storm and Po at Hipgnosis was clean, simple, and immediately striking, with a memorable icon in the shape of the prism.

Having written the definitive anthem of the 1970s, David simply gave it away. Some thought that this was a self-serving act, designed to underline his own musical omnipotence. Bob Grace, the man who’d overseen most of Bowie’s recent songs, is emphatic that in giving away the song, Bowie paid a price: “I thought that was a mistake. If David had put out ‘All the Young Dudes’ himself that autumn, he would have been huge beyond our comprehension. It was great he gave [Mott] the song, but I’m convinced it cost him.” The argument ignores the fact that Bowie remained, at heart, a fan. This was simply a spontaneous act, and in any case the music was pouring out of him.

How about you, Dan? What do you do for a living?” Well, Ben, until recently I was a hired wand for the biggest gang boss in Las Vegas, but we had a falling-out, so mostly I just run short cons and sometimes busk on Fremont Street doing sleight-of-hand tricks for spare change. I guess you could say I’m sort of a criminal bum. “I’m between jobs right now,” I told him. “The economy being what it is.

On that basis, I recently tried to interest a troubled young woman of my acquaintance with Peale’s work, as a substitute for recommending Neville, thinking that his churchiness would appeal (!) to her, since she still retained from childhood a love of the Episcopal church and its rituals. She handed the book back with some disgust: “No, he was satirized by Tom Lehrer.” Those who doubt the power of cultural artifacts to control minds should reflect on the lingering power of one line in a satirical song from 50 years ago; “the most potent weapons known to mankind are satire and ridicule“– Saul Alinsky.

Diane Louise Jordan Diane Louise Jordan is a British television presenter best known for her role in the long-running children’s program Blue Peter, which she hosted from 1990 until 1996. She is currently hosting BBC1’s religious show, Songs of Praise. Also noted for her charity work, Diane Louise Jordan is vice president of the National Children’s Home in England. When in late 1997 I was invited by the Right Honorable Gordon Brown, Chancellor of the Exchequer, to sit on the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Committee, I was clueless as to why I’d been chosen. I was in the middle of a filming assignment in the United States when the call came through. Sitting on the bed in my New York hotel room, still with the receiver in my hand after agreeing to the chancellor’s request, I kept asking myself, “Why me?” The rest of the committee seemed to me to be high fliers of great influence or closely related to her. I was neither. I didn’t fit. But, perhaps, that’s the point. A lot of us think we don’t fit, don’t believe we’re up to much. Yet the truth is we’re all part of something big, and we’re all capable of inspiring others to be the best that they can be. This is what Princess Diana believed. The Princess influenced and inspired many through her life, and now I had an opportunity to be part of something that ensured her influence would continue. It was out responsibility as the Memorial Committee to sift through more than ten thousand suggestions by the British public to find an appropriate memorial to the life and work of the Princess. It was unanimously felt that the memorial should have lasting impact and reflect the many facets of Diana, so we came up with four commemorative projects: the Diana Nurses, a commemorative 5 pound coin, projects in the Royal Parks, and the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Award, for young people between the ages of eleven and eighteen. The Diana Award, as it is now known, was set up to acknowledge and support the achievements of young people throughout Britain. Each year the award is given to individuals or groups who have made an outstanding contribution to their community by improving the lives of others, especially the more vulnerable, or by enhancing the communities in which they live. The Diana Award is also given to those who’ve shown exemplary progress in personal development, particularly if it involves overcoming adversity. I’ve been associated with the Diana Award since it was established in 1999. And now, as a trustee, I’m extremely honored to be further involved, as I believe that the award holders are a living part of the late Princess’s legacy. They represent the kind of brave, caring, idealistic values Diana admired and championed. Like the late Princess, this award simply shines a light on what is already there, already being achieved. It’s as if Diana herself is telling the recipients how fantastic they are. The Princess said her job was to love people, and through this award she is still doing that. Recently, I was at an award holders ceremony. I was overwhelmed to be in an environment surrounded by beautiful young people committed to wanting the best. Like Princess Diana, they all demonstrate, in their individual ways, that when we strive to do our best, whether by overcoming personal adversity or contributing to the well-being of others, it changes us for the better. We see a glimpse of how we could all be if, like Diana, we have the courage to expose our hearts.

Without explaining what’s on my mind, I ask Nafus and Schreiner: Have they seen any recent invasions by exotic arthropods, or any dramatic population outbreaks among native ones? I inquire about arthropods rather than insects because it’s a broader category, inclusive also of such charming non-insect invertebrates as ticks, centipedes, millipedes, and spiders. Asking a professional entomologist about arthropods (and not about, say, bugs) is a way of signaling at least some familiarity with the subject. Still, Nafus rocks backward in his chair, rebounding from the dumbness of my question. “We have invasions and outbreaks all the t

He had expected to find them impressive, perhaps even frightening. He had not thought to find them beautiful. Yet they were. As black as onyx, polished smooth, so the bone seemed to shimmer in the light of his torch. They liked the fire, he sensed. He’d thrust the torch into the mouth of one of the larger skulls and made the shadows leap and dance on the wall behind him. The teeth were long, curving knives of black diamond. The flame of the torch was nothing to them; they had bathed in the heat of far greater fires. When he had moved away, Tyrion could have sworn that the beast’s empty eye sockets had watched him go. There were nineteen skulls. The oldest was more than three thousand years old; the youngest a mere century and a half. The most recent were also the smallest; a matched pair no bigger than mastiff’s skulls, and oddly misshapen, all that remained of the last two hatchlings born on Dragonstone. They were the last of the Targaryen dragons, perhaps the last dragons anywhere, and they had not lived very long. From there the skulls ranged upward in size to the three great monsters of song and story, the dragons that Aegon Targaryen

I think about what makes us lonely on a recent subway ride from Brooklyn to Manhattan. As the train hurtles over the Manhattan Bridge, the subway car is silent, save for the muffled beats of a pop song. A woman up front is reading a book, and a few commuters are dozing. The rest of us are glued to our devices: heads bent, earbuds in, fingers scrolling. The trains sputters and then stops completely mid-bridge; plugged into our own curated digital landscapes, no one looks up. What was once a period of contemplation, boredom, small talk, confrontations, maybe even some light flirting, has been replaced by screens. In addition to filling the blank spaces in our day, our phones double as a crutch to “lean on when we are socially anxious or uncomfortable,” says Julia Bainbridge, a freelance writer and editor, who, in 2016, launched The Lonely Hour, a podcast dedicated to exploring the condition. The world is unpredictable, but our screens provide a convenient buffer against the possibility of spontaneous human interaction.

Another disproportionately fascinating symbol is the Singing Commercial. Singing Commercials are a recent invention; but the Singing Theological and the Singing Devotional -- the hymn and the psalm -- are as old as religion itself. Singing Militaries, or marching songs, are coeval with war, and Singing Patriotics, the precursors of our national anthems, were doubtless used to promote group solidarity, to emphasize the dis­tinction between "us" and "them," by the wandering bands of paleolithic hunters and food gatherers. To most people music is intrinsically attractive. Moreover, melodies tend to ingrain themselves in the listener's mind. A tune will haunt the memory during the whole of a lifetime. Here, for example, is a quite uninterest­ing statement or value judgment. As it stands nobody will pay attention to it. But now set the words to a catchy and easily remembered tune. Immediately they become words of power. Moreover, the words will tend automatically to repeat themselves every time the mel­ody is heard or spontaneously remembered. Orpheus has entered into an alliance with Pavlov -- the power of sound with the conditioned reflex. For the commercial propagandist, as for his colleagues in the fields of poli­tics and religion, music possesses yet another advan­tage. Nonsense which it would be shameful for a rea­sonable being to write, speak or hear spoken can be sung or listened to by that same rational being with pleasure and even with a kind of intellectual convic­tion. Can we learn to separate the pleasure of singing or of listening to song from the all too human tend­ency to believe in the propaganda which the song is putting over? That again is the question.

The carpetbagger issue plagued him from the start of his campaign, became the killer question at the candidates’ forums to which the four hopefuls dragged themselves two and three nights a week. You’ve just lived here a year, how can you know Arizona or the district? Aren’t you just an opportunist? At first he explained that, having never lived anywhere permanently, he moved to his wife’s home state when he retired from the Navy, just as many others had settled in Arizona in recent years. It was a weak response and he knew he was getting beat up. One night he turned it around. This time his face grew red as he listened to the familiar question. “Listen, pal,” he replied, “I spent twenty-two years in the Navy. My father was in the Navy. My grandfather was in the Navy. We in the military service tend to move a lot. We have to live in all parts of the country, all parts of the world. I wish I could have had the luxury, like you, of growing up and living and spending my entire life in a nice place like the First District of Arizona, but I was doing other things. “As a matter of fact, when I think about it now, the place I lived longest in my life was Hanoi.” The audience sat for several seconds in shocked silence, then broke into thunderous applause. “The reply was absolutely the most devastating response to a potentially troublesome political issue I’ve ever heard,” said political columnist John Kolbe, of the Phoenix Gazette.

During the time I was writing the songs for the record that became Grown Backwards, there was love, anger, sadness, and frustration in my life. There were two wars: one begun out of revenge and the second seemingly to consolidate oil interests. Huge amounts of money were expended in what seemed to be obviously futile and counterproductive efforts that many felt would not only bring death to many innocent people, but would end up making us, as a nation, less admired and certainly less safe, both physically and economically, for the foreseeable future. Along with many others, I felt angry—alienated, even—and I did my best to stop the rush into the second conflict, but it was inevitable. It seemed like a misdirected legacy of a nation still stunned, hurt, reeling—a fighter ready to strike out at anything that could be accepted as an enemy. I blogged, and began a campaign that resulted in full-page ads in the New York Times and Rolling Stone urging restraint. You can see an example of one of those ads on the next page.K But it was hopeless. Recent studies have shown that people ignore facts that contradict what they want to believe. Even “smart” people I knew, and many others I respected, were convincing themselves we had to invade. It made me feel like I didn’t know my country and its people, or even my own friends, anymore. How does one react and respond to that? I felt lost and adrift in my home. What kind of music would emerge from living with those feelings? These were not simply abstract political ideas. I felt angry and fucked up every day.

But in the end you can only have one life. One at a time, at least. You could turn, you could pause for a while, but you couldn’t go down two streets at once. The things they didn’t end up doing, the places and people they decided against, all defined them as much as anything else, in the way negative space defines a photo or a song. The lives they didn’t lead were there, too, always with them. Only recently did he begin to see the shape those choices had made.

be a positive and encouraging light in every room you enter. Let the fol owing verse be your battle cry and let your faith shine before others. 2 Timothy 4:7 (ESV) I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. I heard a recent sermon entitled “Your Legacy.” There’s a great song by Hannah Kerr that asks that same question. It’s one of those songs that brings chil s to your spine. YouTube “Hannah Kerr Love I Leave Behind (Acoustic)