Tommy is twenty-nine, lives and loves in London, and has a morbid fear of the c word (commitment), the b word (boyfriend), and the f word (forgetting to call his drug dealer before the weekend). But when he begins to feel the urge to become a father, and the pressure from his boyfriend to make a real commitment to their relationship, Tommy starts to wonder if his chosen lifestyle can ever make him happy. Faced with the choice of maintaining his hedonistic, drugged-out, and admittedly fabulous existence or chucking it all in favor of a far more sensitive, fulfilling, and—let's face it—slightly more staid lifestyle, Tommy finds himself in a true quandary. Through a series of adventures and misadventures that lead him from London nightspots to New York bedrooms and back, our boy Tommy manages to answer some of life's most pressing questions—even those he never thought to ask.
"A Demons Tale" "Little Mikey thought thing's at home were bad,that is until he stumbles into Germany's 'Black forest,'within an attempt to run away from home...and encounters a 1,500 year- old demon (consealed within an eerie cave)in posession of a book, so evil, that God spits upon it's very existance.... Just when the young boy assumes death inevitable...he's told a story by the demon that ultimately changes everything...." "As the terrifying tale unfolds,the child discovers how this unique demon (who was once a child himself)rose to become what he now is... yet,the very real question remains,is Mikey willing to exchange his already condemned soul for a far greater evil,than he has ever known...?"
From baby pictures in the cloud to a high school's digital surveillance system: how adults unwittingly compromise children's privacy online. Our children's first digital footprints are made before they can walk—even before they are born—as parents use fertility apps to aid conception, post ultrasound images, and share their baby's hospital mug shot. Then, in rapid succession come terabytes of baby pictures stored in the cloud, digital baby monitors with built-in artificial intelligence, and real-time updates from daycare. When school starts, there are cafeteria cards that catalog food purchases, bus passes that track when kids are on and off the bus, electronic health records in the nurse's office, and a school surveillance system that has eyes everywhere. Unwittingly, parents, teachers, and other trusted adults are compiling digital dossiers for children that could be available to everyone—friends, employers, law enforcement—forever. In this incisive book, Leah Plunkett examines the implications of “sharenthood”—adults' excessive digital sharing of children's data. She outlines the mistakes adults make with kids' private information, the risks that result, and the legal system that enables “sharenting.” Plunkett describes various modes of sharenting—including “commercial sharenting,” efforts by parents to use their families' private experiences to make money—and unpacks the faulty assumptions made by our legal system about children, parents, and privacy. She proposes a “thought compass” to guide adults in their decision making about children's digital data: play, forget, connect, and respect. Enshrining every false step and bad choice, Plunkett argues, can rob children of their chance to explore and learn lessons. The Internet needs to forget. We need to remember.
Every Tiger has a Tale shares the fascinating stories of more than forty graduates of Cleveland Heights High. They faced incredible challenges, yet battled to succeed. A boy’s mother dies from drugs, but he becomes a judge. A Heights grad produces the Grammy Awards. A welfare mom puts her children in daycare, and becomes a doctor. A politician helps launch Barack Obama’s career. At a gathering of Holocaust survivors, a man finds the love of his life. A kid from Heights becomes a millionaire, yet sees his fortune and the site of his dream home just slide away. He excels in the Super Bowl. A young man just misses the gunfire at Kent State. A skilled interviewer of the literary giants of our time. A boy uprooted from California, dumped in a detention camp in Arizona, and winds up at Heights High The radio talk-show host with the most air-time ever. Wall Street’s original Money Honey. A woman sparks TV’s reality show craze. How is the founding father of Las Vegas connected to Heights High? Intriguing stories with surprising twists and turns. A treasure of life lessons. All from grads of just one school. Yes, Every Tiger has a Tale.
. . is the story of a young English lad, still in his teens who, between 1950 and 1952, underwent that rite of passage into adulthood called national service – but with a difference. Half of it was spent with the Welch Regiment, part of the Commonwealth Division of the United Nations forces in Korea. Luckily, it was during the quieter middle phase of that war, the Forgotten War and the last to be fought from trenches. He experienced moments of unexpected pleasure, ennui, abject terror, boredom, utter weariness and despair, sadness, joy, laughter and profound revelation all of which are part of this tale. There is some blood and guts but, through great good fortune, none of his personal experiencing. This is a story of how it was for one reasonably well educated boy sent halfway across the world on His/Her Majesties business to an uncertain fate. He returned a man – in one sense at least!
The eighteen interdisciplinary essays in this volume were presented in 2001 in Sydney, Australia, at the Third International Conference on Word and Music Studies, which was sponsored by The International Association for Word and Music Studies (WMA). The conference celebrated the sixty-fifth birthday of Steven Paul Scher, arguably the central figure in word and music studies during the last thirty-five years. The first section of this volume comprises ten articles that discuss, or are methodologically based upon, Scher’s many analyses of and critical commentaries on the field, particularly on interrelationships between words and music. The authors cover such topics as semiotics, intermediality, hermeneutics, the de-essentialization of the arts, and the works of a wide range of literary figures and composers that include Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Proust, T. S. Eliot, Goethe, Hölderlin, Mann, Britten, Schubert, Schumann, and Wagner.The second section consists of a second set of papers presented at the conference that are devoted to a different area of word and music studies: cultural identity and the musical stage. Eight scholars investigate – and often problematize – widespread assumptions regarding ‘national’ and ‘cultural’ music, language, plots, and production values in musical stage works. Topics include the National Socialists’ construction of German national identity; reception-based examinations of cultural identity and various “national” opera styles; and the means by which composers, librettists, and lyricists have attempted to establish national or cultural identity through their stage works.
Born from a dying red giant, the atom Fe orbits the early Solar system, trapped aboard an iron-nickel asteroid. Now, after billions of years of waiting, Fe is about to fall to Earth and into the clutches of vicious and clever Homo sapiens. Cloud Atlas meets Forrest Gump meets Albert Einstein in this fast-paced, grippingly brilliant 8-billion-year biography of the universe’s most interesting iron atom. Benjamin Bronte’s brilliant debut novel FE: AN ATOM’S TALE (Elegua Editions, May 28, 2024) is an ingenious telling of humanity’s past, present, and future, all through the quantum-scale perspective of a single atom. Near-indestructible and ineffably magnetic, Fe is a hero like no other. After its flaming, plummeting asteroid slams into the sands of ancient Mesopotamia, Fe finds itself forged into a deadly weapon by powerful princes whose peoples have not yet discovered the secret of iron smelting. Time, gravity, and fundamental forces march ever onwards, leaving unforgettable characters and their deeply-human narratives behind, following the immortal and infinitesimal Fe to its next grand adventure. Thrilling scenes of the Second World War give way to the humorous, and often maddening, complexity of our own overconnected 21st-century world–only for Fe to leave Earth forever, welded into a spaceship, destined to settle other worlds… In FE: AN ATOM’S TALE, the science on every page is meticulously accurate, while its immersive, metaphor-rich writing style ensures that readers remain entertained rather than overwhelmed. Benjamin Bronte’s training as a physicist and educator, paired with relentless research, has produced an unprecedented level of plausibility for a work of science fiction. Readers of FE: AN ATOM’S TALE will learn how magnetic fields work during a shoot-out in a drug lab, and they’ll come to appreciate the role of hemoglobin while enjoying a tribal feast. Following Fe, readers will learn about metallurgy, cosmology, how to break into the Louvre, dive-bombers, fair prices for classic guitars, photosynthesis, and how to accidentally start a religion. Fe may be a single, mindless atom of iron, but what other novel’s main character rides on a meteor, is captured by Nazis, and lives inside a goat? Fe’s may be the smallest story ever told, but no other novel has gone so deep and in such an entertaining manner. Garnering instant praise from fans in early releases, FE: AN ATOM’S TALE is proving to be a remarkably unique, and remarkably entertaining, debut. Written in the spirit of Isaac Asimov and hard science fiction like Steven Baxter and Arthur C. Clarke, FE: AN ATOM’S TALE presents something entirely new: a groundbreaking novel that puts the ‘science’ back in science fiction.
