Walter van Praag cycled from Paris to Istanbul with a small support team, including young film maker Lucas Li to raise awareness of cystic fibrosis Their journey started on a rainy morning in Paris. It was Saturday July 28, 2007, and through the Paris traffic they left for Istanbul with 4395 kilometers of riding ahead of them. They travelled through France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Romania and Bulgaria before reaching their goal of Istanbul in Turkey.
Walter's life is a struggle to survive, there are times when he has to fight for every breath. This book will impress, inspire and enlighten readers on how extreme obstacles can be overcome by sheer guts and determination in the face of a chronic illness. It is also an entertaining travelogue of parts of Eastern Europe that few of us would visit, and certainly not on a 4,000 Km journey by bicycle with a less than 50% lung capacity. The story covers the planning and execution of an amazing journey by a small band of people, some of whom had not met each other before and who are thrown together in funny, poignant, and sometimes almost unendurable and frustrating circumstances. Central is the author, Walter who is 42 and has cystic fibrosis, which as many will know is a chronic and debilitating condition from which most people are lucky to survive into their 30's.
The witch, the vampire and the werewolf endure in modern horror. These "old monsters" have their origins in Aristotle as studied in the universities of medieval Europe, where Christian scholars reconciled works of natural philosophy and medicine with theological precepts. They codified divine perfection as warm, light, male and associated with the ethereal world beyond the moon, while evil imperfection was cold, dark, female and bound to the corrupt world below the moon. All who did not conform to divine goodness--including un-holy women and Jews--were considered evil and ascribed a melancholic, blood hungry and demonic physiology. This construct was the basis for anti-woman and anti-Jewish discourse that has persisted through modern Western culture. Nowhere is this more evident than in horror films, where the witch, the vampire and the werewolf represent our fear of the inverted other.
Every culture knows the phenomenon of monsters, terrifying creatures that represent complete alterity and challenge every basic notion of self and identity within a cultural paradigm. In Latin and Greek culture, the monster was created as a marvel, appearing as something which, like transgression itself, did not belong to the assumed natural order of things. Therefore, it could only be created by a divinity responsible for its creation, composition, goals and stability, but it was triggered by some in- or non-human action performed by humans. The identification of something as monstrous denotes its place outside and beyond social norms and values. The monster-evoking transgression is most often indistinguishable from reactions to the experience of otherness, merging the limits of humanity with the limits of a given culture. The topic entails a large intersection among the cultural domains of law, literature, philosophy, anthropology, and technology. Monstrosity has indeed become a necessary condition of our existence in the 21st century: it serves as a representation of change itself. In the process of analysis there are three theoretical approaches: psychoanalytical, representational, ontological. The volume therefore aims at examining the concept of monstrosity from three main perspectives: technophobic, xenophobic, superdiversity. Today’s globalized world is shaped in the unprecedented phenomenon of international migration. The resistance to this phenomenon causes the demonization of the Other, seen as the antagonist and the monster. The monster becomes therefore the ethnic Other, the alien. To reach this new perspective on monstrosity we must start by examining the many facets of monstrosity, also diachronically: from the philological origin of the term to the Roman and classical viewpoint, from the Renaissance medical perspective to the religious background, from the new filmic exploitations in the 20th and 21st centuries to the very recent ethnological and anthropological points of view, to the latest technological perspective , dealing with artificial intelligence.
The contributors to Monster Theory consider beasts, demons, freaks and fiends as symbolic expressions of cultural unease that pervade a society and shape its collective behavior. Through a historical sampling of monsters, these essays argue that our fascination for the monstrous testifies to our continued desire to explore difference and prohibition.
This is the story of LSD told by a concerned yet hopeful father, organic chemist Albert Hofmann, Ph.D. He traces LSD's path from a promising psychiatric research medicine to a recreational drug sparking hysteria and prohibition. In LSD: My Problem Child, we follow Dr. Hofmann's trek across Mexico to discover sacred plants related to LSD, and listen in as he corresponds with other notable figures about his remarkable discovery. Underlying it all is Dr. Hofmann's powerful conclusion that mystical experiences may be our planet's best hope for survival. Whether induced by LSD, meditation, or arising spontaneously, such experiences help us to comprehend "the wonder, the mystery of the divine, in the microcosm of the atom, in the macrocosm of the spiral nebula, in the seeds of plants, in the body and soul of people." More than sixty years after the birth of Albert Hofmann's problem child, his vision of its true potential is more relevant, and more needed, than ever.
A story of teamwork with a positive message, featuring Wayne Gretzky and Coach Wally (Wayne's dad, Walter Gretzky) Taylor is so excited when he makes the hockey team -- and not just any team, but HIS team. The boy they are already calling The Great One. Taylor wants to be great too, but he's still got a lot to learn. Lucky for him, Coach Wally is in his corner, guiding him through the ups and downs of being part of a hockey team, and being the best player he can be. As Coach Wally says, if you have a good time, work hard and do your best, "that is all that matters."
A Dictonary of Science and Technology. Color Illustration Section. Symbols and Units. Fundamental Physical Constants. Measurement Conversion. Periodic Table of the Elements. Atomic Weights. Particles. The Solar System. Geologial Timetable. Five-Kingdom Classification of Organisms. Chronology of Modern Science. Photo Credits.
Trick or Treat! Get a worm cup of tea, curl by the fire, and enjoy the cold chills of this meticulously edited horror collection, jam-packed with the darkest mysteries, supernatural thrillers and gothic romances: James Malcolm Rymer & Thomas Peckett Prest: Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street Edgar Allan Poe: The Tell-Tale Heart The Fall of the House of Usher The Cask of Amontillado The Masque of the Red Death The Murders in the Rue Morgue Mary Shelley: Frankenstein The Mortal Immortal The Evil Eye John William Polidori: The Vampyre Bram Stoker: Dracula Théophile Gautier: Clarimonde The Mummy's Foot Washington Irving: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow The Spectre Bridegroom Henry James: The Turn of the Screw The Ghostly Rental H. P. Lovecraft: The Dunwich Horror From Beyond M. R. James: Canon Alberic's Scrap-Book Lost Hearts Wilkie Collins: The Haunted Hotel The Dead Secret E. F. Benson: The Room in the Tower The Terror by Night Nathaniel Hawthorne: Rappaccini's Daughter Ambrose Bierce: The Death of Halpin Frayser One Summer Night Arthur Machen: The Great God Pan The Three Impostors William Hope Hodgson: The House on the Borderland The Night Land Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder M. P. Shiel: Shapes in the Fire Arthur Conan Doyle: The Leather Funnel The Beetle Hunter Ralph Adams Cram: Black Spirits and White Grant Allen: The Reverend John Creedy Dr. Greatrex's Engagement Richard Marsh: The Beetle Thomas Hardy: What the Shepherd Saw The Grave by the Handpost Charles Dickens: The Signal-Man The Hanged Man's Bride Guy de Maupassant: The Horla The Flayed Hand Pedro De Alarçon: The Nail Walter Hubbell: The Great Amherst Mystery Francis Marion Crawford: The Dead Smile The Screaming Skull Man Overboard! For The Blood is the Life The Upper Berth By The Water of Paradise The Doll's Ghost John Buchan: No-Man's-Land The Watcher by the Threshold The Monkey's Paw The Severed Hand The Ghost in the Cap'n Brown House The Apparition of Mrs. Veal (Daniel Defoe) When the World Was Young (Jack London)…
