Welcome to Black Cat Weekly #33. The astute will notice that this issue is being released early—with the holidays nearly upon us (and relatives set to descend on our household), I thought it prudent to finish it up early, just to make sure there weren’t any unfortunately delays. I think you’ll find this issue particularly interesting. Darrell Schweitzer’s historic interview with C.J. Cherryh from 1978 is fascinating, since she talks about her writing process. (If you aren’t familiar with her work, you’ve missed some of the best science fiction of the last 50 years.). For mystery lovers, we have great tales from Greg Herren (courtesy of editor Barb Goffman) and Patricia Dusenbury (courtesy of editor Michael Bracken), plus a solve-it-yourself mystery from Hal Charles. Our novel, Mission of Revenge, by Edison Marshall mixes many genres—crime, romance, adventure…all set in the frozen north! Science fiction readers have an original from Nancy Jane Moore (courtesy of editor Cynthia Ward), plus classics by Lester del Rey and Larry Tritten. For fantasy, look no further than “The Goddess’ Legacy,” by Malcolm Jameson, and the second part of Mel Gilden’s serialized novel, The Case by Case Casebook of Emily Silverwood. Good stuff! Here’s the lineup: Non-Fiction: “Speaking with C.J. Cherryh,” conducted by Darrell Schweitzer [interview] Mysteries / Suspense / Adventure: “Nor Death Will Us Part,” by Patricia Dusenbury [Michael Bracken Presents short story] “An Eggceptional Solution,” by Hal Charles [solve-it-yourself mystery] “The Silky Veils of Ardor,” by Greg Herren [Barb Goffman Presents short story] Mission of Revenge, by Edison Marshall [novel] Science Fiction & Fantasy: “The Art of War,” by Nancy Jane Moore [Cynthia Ward Presents short story] “Playback,” by Larry Tritten [short story] “The One-eyed Man,” by Lester del Rey [short story] “The Goddess’ Legacy,” by Malcolm Jameson [short story] The Case by Case Casebook of Emily Silverwood, by Mel Gilden (Part 2 of 4) [Serial Novel]
The new Pro Version of the famous Sniffy software simulates a wide range of learning phenomena that are typically discussed in courses on the Psychology of Learning. Sniffy, a realistic digital rat in an operant chamber (Skinner Box), gives students hands-on experience setting up and conducting experiments that demonstrate most of the major phenomena of operant and classical conditioning. Users begin by training Sniffy to press a bar to obtain food and progress to studies of complex learning phenomena. In addition, a series of "Mind Windows" enable students to visualize how Sniffy's experiences in the Skinner Box produce the psychological changes that their textbooks discuss in connection with the phenomena simulated. The Sniffy, Pro Version CD-ROM comes packaged in the front of a brief Lab Manual that walk users through the steps that they need to follow to set up a wide variety of operant and classical conditioning experiments that closely resemble experiments discussed in learning texts.
A new collection of short fiction from the Governor General’s Literary Award-winning author and Scotiabank Giller Prize finalist Greg Hollingshead. Act Normal is a collection of sharp, new comic stories about sex, art, and the daily risk of having accidents. Highly original, occasionally dark, but always endearing, these stories are filled with characters who are forced to confront strange behaviour in both themselves and others. In “The Amazing Insult,” a blow to the head in a boating accident increases a woman’s intelligence and alters her sexual orientation. A man flees a rural meditation camp in for a highway bar in “The Retreat,” where he does his best to get to know a Haitian stripper. A depressed carpenter has to take a break from building his client’s fence in “Unbounded.” In “Night Dreams of the Wise,” a man sleeping with the wife of the British Defense Secretary learns, after a particularly wild night, to stop doing foolish things. A cleric is haunted by the revenant of a member of his diocese in “Miss Buffet.” Nominated for a National Magazine Award, “The Drug-Friendly House,” is the story of a man who attempts to befriend a woman living in a house that the neighbourhood association has labelled “drug friendly.” Intelligent, insightful, humorous, and occasionally bizarre, Act Normal is a masterful return by Hollingshead to the short story form. Set in the treacherous terrain of the everyday, this collection is about the quest to find love and truth in a broken world.
In 1922, a coal miner strike spread across the United States, swallowing the heavily-unionized mining town of Herrin, Illinois. When the owner of the town's local mine hired non-union workers to break the strike, violent conflict broke out between the strikebreakers and unionized miners, who were all heavily armed. When strikebreakers surrendered and were promised safe passage home, the unionized miners began executing them before large, cheering crowds. This book tells the cruel truth behind the story that the coal industry tried to suppress and that Herrin wants to forget. A thorough account of the massacre and its aftermath, this book sets a heartland tragedy against the rise and decline of the coal industry.
Around the world there are grandparents, parents, and children who can still sing ditties by Tigger or Baloo the Bear or the Seven Dwarves. This staying power and global reach is in large part a testimony to the pizzazz of performers, songwriters, and other creative artists who worked with Walt Disney Records. Mouse Tracks: The Story of Walt Disney Records chronicles for the first time the fifty-year history of the Disney recording companies launched by Walt Disney and Roy Disney in the mid-1950s, when Disneyland Park, Davy Crockett, and the Mickey Mouse Club were taking the world by storm. The book provides a perspective on all-time Disney favorites and features anecdotes, reminiscences, and biographies of the artists who brought Disney magic to audio. Authors Tim Hollis and Greg Ehrbar go behind the scenes at the Walt Disney Studios and discover that in the early days Walt Disney and Roy Disney resisted going into the record business before the success of "The Ballad of Davy Crockett" ignited the in-house label. Along the way, the book traces the recording adventures of such Disney favorites as Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Cinderella, Bambi, Jiminy Cricket, Winnie the Pooh, and even Walt Disney himself. Mouse Tracks reveals the struggles, major successes, and occasional misfires. Included are impressions and details of teen-pop princesses Annette Funicello and Hayley Mills, the Mary Poppins phenomenon, a Disney-style "British Invasion," and a low period when sagging sales forced Walt Disney to suggest closing the division down. Complementing each chapter are brief performer biographies, reproductions of album covers and art, and facsimiles of related promotional material. Mouse Tracks is a collector's bonanza of information on this little-analyzed side of the Disney empire. Learn more about the book and the authors at www.mousetracksonline.com.
Three decades ago in a cordoned-off corner of the developing world an angry Catholic priest armed only with pencil, paper, and crayons, declared a revolution. From a shanty school shared with Buddhists and Muslims in Bangkok's squatter slums, Father Joe Maier began his advance on abject poverty. Today, his Human Development Foundation and Mercy Centre charity is responsible for thirty-two preschools that have taught more than twenty thousand children how to read and write. Despite the crippling neglect found in impoverishment, he is raising international scholars and injecting a sense of purpose into shantytowns and squatter camps that used to have neither.
Since launching his career at the Village Voice in the early 1980s Greg Tate has been one of the premiere critical voices on contemporary Black music, art, literature, film, and politics. Flyboy 2 provides a panoramic view of the past thirty years of Tate's influential work. Whether interviewing Miles Davis or Ice Cube, reviewing an Azealia Banks mixtape or Suzan-Lori Parks's Topdog/Underdog, discussing visual artist Kara Walker or writer Clarence Major, or analyzing the ties between Afro-futurism, Black feminism, and social movements, Tate's resounding critical insights illustrate how race, gender, and class become manifest in American popular culture. Above all, Tate demonstrates through his signature mix of vernacular poetics and cultural theory and criticism why visionary Black artists, intellectuals, aesthetics, philosophies, and politics matter to twenty-first-century America.
All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream. (Edgar Allen Poe) Ive learned to run on the high road. If I come to a puddle, I do my best to go around it. If I cant, I jump in with both feet. Ive learned to notice and appreciate the beauty I see as I go down the road. Ive learned to live in the positive but Ive learned how to live with the negative. I run for my body. I run for my mind. But most of all I RUN to LIVE.
RELENTLESS AVENGER Ben Halpern figured on being a Mississippi hill farmer before the war came and killed his pa, dragging Ben away from home. Unjustly imprisoned, Ben was tough enough to survive, smart enough to escape the profiteering Confederate commander who had trampled on his life and taken his dream. On the dodge from both armies, with a trail-wise companion named Ridge Parkman, Ben headed west, tracking Major Salem to a Colorado town embroiled in a range war of its own. Braced for a cavalry charge of Salem’s land-stealing marauders, Ben and Ridge united the outnumbered ranchers in a fiery, last-ditch stand. Ben swore Salem’s future was a bullet and a curse.
An updated, expanded revision of a classic resource showing how we are in the midst of a radical shift from church as institution to church as organism in which ministry is being returned to the people of God.
From the 'Fathers' of the Internet, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, to National Medal of Technology winners, Ray Kurzweil and Bob Metcalfe, listen to stories from the lives of modern day geniuses. Find out how mentors and educators inspired these geniuses to believe in their own powers of the mind and achieve their dreams in technology creativity. In these stories, you will discover that these geniuses are not so different than you. With hard work, the right type of education and a bit of happenstance, you too can achieve the massive levels of creativity and impact on the world these geniuses attained. Change the world! Make a difference! Listen to the stories within this book and discover your own genius within just waiting to escape and shine for the world.
When a mining colony on an endangered moon is threatened, it’s a race against time for the Enterprise crew to find a solution in this original novel set in the universe of Star Trek: The Original Series. The USS Enterprise responds to a distress call from a vital dilithium-mining colony in the Klondike system. The colony is located on Skagway, a moon orbiting Klondike-6, a gas giant not unlike Saturn. For unknown reasons, the planet’s rings are coming apart, threatening the colony and its inhabitants. Kirk and his crew need to find a solution—fast.There are more than 3,000 colonists, including hundreds of families, on Skagway, which is more than even the Enterprise can take on, and there are no other rescue ships or habitable planets anywhere in the vicinity. Meanwhile, an approaching comet that may be the source of the crisis turns out to be a mysterious alien probe. Sensors indicate that the probe is incredibly old and running low on power. Suspecting that the probe may have something to do with the threat to Skagway, Kirk has the probe beamed aboard the Enterprise. Suddenly after a blinding flash, Kirk suddenly finds himself floating in orbit above Saturn in our solar system, drifting in space wearing a twenty-first century NASA spacesuit. What just happened?
The dramatic events of 2020—the presidential election, the COVID-19 pandemic, protests for racial justice—affected every corner of American life. What did these events mean for the residents of small towns and cities that are often overlooked by national newspapers? How do local stories change when they are told by journalists with roots in these communities? And what is lost as this kind of coverage disappears? American Deadline brings together dispatches from four longtime local journalists in different parts of the United States that tell the story of 2020 anew. It shares reporting from Bowling Green, Virginia; Macon, Georgia; McKeesport, Pennsylvania; and McAllen, Texas—two towns that lost their local newspapers and two where they are barely hanging on. The authors consider what makes each town distinctive and how these local perspectives tell a part of a broader American story. This book reports on how residents of these towns grapple with and talk about issues relating to race, schooling, health, immigration, deindustrialization, as well as local and national politics amid a changing and increasingly precarious information ecosystem. A distinct and intimate look at a calamitous year, American Deadline is an important book for all readers interested in the possibilities and future of local journalism.
Being unplugged doesn't mean you're without power. Develop the agility and strength that will give your performances power by making them appear effortless. All music in each 96-page book is shown in TAB and standard notation and recorded on the accompanying CD and/or DVD for demonstration and playing along.
These things happened. They were glorious and they changed the world,' said Charlie Wilson, of America's role backing the anti-Soviet mujahideen. 'And then we fucked up the endgame.' With no support for Afghanistan after that war, the vacuum was filled by the Taliban and bin Laden. The Ledger assesses the West's similarly failed approach to Afghanistan after 9/11-in military, diplomatic, political and developmental terms. Dr David Kilcullen and Dr Greg Mills are uniquely placed to reflect backwards and forwards on the Afghan conflict: they worked with the international mission both as advisers and within the Arg, and they have considerable experience of counterinsurgency and stabilization operations elsewhere in the world. Here these two experts show that there is plenty of blame to go around when explaining the failure to bring peace to Afghanistan after 9/11. The signs of collapse were conveniently ignored, in favor of political narratives of progress and success. Yet for Afghans, the war and its geopolitical effects are not over because NATO is gone-Afghanistan remains globally connected through digital communications and networks. This vital book explains why and where failings in Afghanistan happened, warning against exceptionalist approaches to future peacebuilding missions around the globe.
A fresh, comprehensive, and entertaining take on hockey goalies In hockey, goalies have always been a contradiction - solitary men in a team game, the last line of defence and the stalwarts expected to save the day after any and every miscue and collapse from his teammates. It's no wonder that anyone who played the position has had his sanity questioned; yet some of the biggest innovations in the game have come from its puckstoppers. In The Goaltenders' Union, Greg Oliver and Richard Kamchen talk to more than 60 keepers of yesterday and today, finding common threads to their stories, and in dozens of interviews about them with other coaches and players. From Gilles "Gratoony the Loony" Gratton, who refused to play because the moon was out of alignment with Jupiter, to Jonathan Quick, the athletically gifted master keeper of today's game, the book is an entertaining and enlightening peek behind the mask.
This book aims to help countries design and implement a legal framework for a viable private health insurance market, with rationale for insurance regulation, institutions involved, and standards and protections used in regulating private health insurance.
A focused study on Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's cinematic contributions to the war effort, arguing for the centrality of propaganda to their work as film artists. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger are widely hailed as two of the greatest filmmakers in British cinema history. The release of their first movie, The Spy in Black, barely preceded the beginning of World War Two, and a number of their early masterworks, including The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, A Canterbury Tale, and A Matter of Life and Death, were produced in the service of the war effort. Through exploring the relationship between art and propaganda, this book shows that Powell and Pressburger saw no contradiction between their aesthetic ambitions and their cinematic war work: propaganda imperatives were highly conducive to their objectives as both commercial cinema practitioners and artists. Drawing on production materials from the archives of the British Film Institute, this book charts three phases in Powell and Pressburger's wartime career: from first-time collaborators who strive to reconcile popular cinematic forms with developing notions of what constitutes effective propaganda; to accomplished, and sometimes controversial, propagandists whose movies center upon Britain's relations with its enemies and allies; to filmmakers whose responsiveness to the propaganda requirements of the late war is matched by a focus, shared by the Ministry of Information, on what the post-war future would bring.
Professional football in the last half century has been a sport marked by relentless innovation. For fans determined to keep up with the changes that have transformed the game, close examination of the coaching footage is a must. In The Games That Changed the Game, Ron Jaworski—pro football’s #1 game-tape guru—breaks down the film from seven of the most momentous contests of the last fifty years, giving readers a drive-by-drive, play-by-play guide to the evolutionary leaps that define the modern NFL. From Sid Gillman’s development of the Vertical Stretch, which launched the era of wide-open passing offenses, to Bill Belichick’s daring defensive game plan in Super Bowl XXXVI, which enabled his outgunned squad to upset the heavily favored St. Louis Rams and usher in the New England Patriots dynasty, the most cutting-edge concepts come alive again through the recollections of nearly seventy coaches and players. You’ll never watch NFL football the same way again.
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