I will be at Booth #319 signing copies of my four latest books while my wife, owner of Susannes Passions will be selling her hand made one-of-a-kind pop culture jewelry and baubles. Walking Dead stars will be on hand, awesome cosplayers and great friends. Don’t miss the fun! See you there!
The Amazing Arizona Comic Con Returns to Phoenix for 2014!
January 24-26, 2014
Phoenix Convention Center
100 N. Third St.
Phoenix, AZ 85004
Filed under Humor and Observations
Cute dog pictures for Monday. Another episode of dog shaming…
Filed under Animals, Humor and Observations
Reposted from List Muse via:
How to be well-read in no time: 40 short novels is a list of books that provides a varied glimpse of the written style of many of the great authors. A concise selection, the titles can be worked through over a very short period, or, alternatively, they can be sandwiched between larger classics in an even more ambitious reading program. For further reading suggestions see our Top 100 Novels of All Time.
Slaughterhouse-Five, an American classic, is one of the world’s great antiwar books. Centering on the infamous firebombing of Dresden, Billy Pilgrim’s odyssey through time reflects the mythic journey of our own fractured lives as we search for meaning in what we fear most. More »
Widely acclaimed since its first publication in 1927, Virginia Woolf’s ‘To the Lighthouse’ is a novel whose overt simplicity of plot hides a complex mix of autobiographical detail, searching social questions and deep philosophical enigmas. The author’s innovative use of nonlinear plot, stream- … More »
By Franz Kafka
It is one of the most memorable first lines in all of literature: “When Gregor Samsa woke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed into some kind of monstrous vermin.” So begins Kafka’s famous short story, The Metamorphosis. Kafka considered publishing it with two of the … More »
This is a classic tale of humanity awash in totalitarianism. A farm is taken over by its overworked, mistreated animals. With flaming idealism and stirring slogans, they set out to create a paradise of progress, justice, and equality. First published during the epoch of Stalinist Russia, today … More »
Of Mice and Men is a novel written by Nobel Prize-winning author John Steinbeck. Published in 1937, it tells the tragic story of George Milton and Lennie Small, two displaced migrant ranch workers, who move from place to place in search of new job opportunities during the Great … More »
The last novel Ernest Hemingway saw published, The Old Man and the Sea has proved itself to be one of the enduring works of American fiction. It is the story of an old Cuban fisherman and his supreme ordeal: a relentless, agonizing battle with a giant marlin far … More »
A modern classic, this early novel by Nobel Laureate J. M. Coetzee centers on the crisis of conscience and morality of the Magistrate-a loyal servant of the Empire working in a tiny frontier town, doing his best to ignore an inevitable war with the “barbarians.” More »
This new selection of Dickens’s Christmas writings confirms his lasting influence upon our idea of the Christmas spirit: that Christmas is a time for celebration, charity, and memory. In addition to the beloved A Christmas Carol, this volume includes such festive works as … More »
Things Fall Apart tells two intertwining stories, both centering on Okonkwo, a “strong man” of an Ibo village in Nigeria. The first, a powerful fable of the immemorial conflict between the individual and society, traces Okonkwo’s fall from grace with the tribal world. The second, as modern as … More »
By Albert Camus
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)Albert Camus’s spare, laconic masterpiece about a Frenchman who murders an Arab in Algeria is famous for having diagnosed, with a clarity almost scientific, that condition of reckless alienation and spiritual exhaustion that characterized so much of twentieth-century life. Possessing both the force of a … More »
Long been recognized not only as one of William Faulkner’s greatest works, but also as the most accessible of his major novels. This Norton Critical Edition is based on the 1985 corrected text and is accompanied by detailed explanatory annotations. “Backgrounds and Contexts” is divided … More »
Imaginary conversations between Marco Polo and his host, the Chinese ruler Kublai Khan, conjure up cities of magical times. “Of all tasks, describing the contents of a book is the most difficult and in the case of a marvelous invention like Invisible Cities, perfectly irrelevant” (Gore Vidal). Translated … More »
Dark allegory describes the narrator’s journey up the Congo River and his meeting with, and fascination by, Mr. Kurtz, a mysterious personage who dominates the unruly inhabitants of the region. Masterly blend of adventure, character development, psychological penetration. Considered by many Conrad’s finest, most enigmatic story. More »
“I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused,” Graham Greene’s narrator Fowler remarks of Alden Pyle, the eponymous “Quiet American” of what is perhaps the most controversial novel of his career. Pyle is the brash young idealist sent out by Washington … More »
By Leo Tolstoy
Tolstoy’s most famous novella is an intense and moving examination of death and the possibilities of redemption, here in a powerful translation by the award-winning Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.Ivan Ilyich is a middle-aged man who has spent his life focused on his career as a bureaucrat and … More »
By H. G. Wells
When a Victorian scientist propels himself into the year a.d. 802,701, he is initially delighted to find that suffering has been replaced by beauty, contentment, and peace. Entranced at first by the Eloi, an elfin species descended from man, he soon realizes that these beautiful people are simply … More »
Originally published in 1941, Arthur Koestler’s modern masterpiece, Darkness At Noon, is a powerful and haunting portrait of a Communist revolutionary caught in the vicious fray of the Moscow show trials of the late 1930s. During Stalin’s purges, Nicholas Rubashov, an aging revolutionary, is imprisoned and … More »
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s third book, stands as the supreme achievement of his career. This exemplary novel of the Jazz Age has been acclaimed by generations of readers. The story of the fabulously wealthy Jay Gatsby and his love for the beautiful Daisy Buchanan, of lavish … More »
In 1864, just prior to the years in which he wrote his greatest novels—Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Possessed and The Brothers Karamazov—Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881) penned the darkly fascinating Notes from the Underground. Its nameless hero is a profoundly alienated individual in whose brooding self-analysis there is … More »
By Oscar Wilde
Since its first publication in 1890, Oscar Wilde’s only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, has remained the subject of critical controversy. Acclaimed by some as an instructive moral tale, it has been denounced by others for its implicit immorality. After having his … More »
ENDURING LITERATURE ILLUMINATED BY PRACTICAL SCHOLARSHIP The story of a young soldier’s quest for manhood during the American Civil War. EACH ENRICHED CLASSIC EDITION INCLUDES: • A concise introduction that gives readers important background information • A chronology of the author’s life and work … More »
Anyone who has read J.D. Salinger’s New Yorker stories–particularly A Perfect Day for Bananafish, Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut, The Laughing Man, and For Esme With Love and Squalor–will not be surprised by the fact that his first novel is full of children. The hero-narrator of The Catcher in … More »
When a young graduate returns home he is accompanied, much to his father and uncle’s discomfort, by a strange friend “who doesn’t acknowledge any authorities, who doesn’t accept a single principle on faith.” Turgenev’s masterpiece of generational conflict shocked Russian society when … More »
By Herman Hesse
This classic novel of self-discovery has inspired generations of seekers. With parallels to the enlightenment of the Buddha, Hesse’s Siddhartha is the story of a young Brahmin’s quest for the ultimate reality. His quest takes him from the extremes of indulgent sensuality to the rigors of ascetism and … More »
Robert Louis Stevenson’s short novel, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, first published in 1886, became an instant classic, a Gothic horror originating in a feverish nightmare whose hallucinatory setting in the back streets of London gripped a nation mesmerized by crime and violence. Its revelatory ending … More »
By Henry James
This Modern Library Paperback Classics edition brings together one of literature’s most famous ghost stories and one of Henry James’s most unusual novellas. In The Turn of the Screw, a governess is haunted by ghosts from her young charges past; Virginia Woolf said of this masterpiece of psychological … More »
Since childhood, Kusama has been afflicted with a condition that makes her see spots, which means she sees the world in a surreal, almost hallucinogenic way that sits very well with the ‘Wonderland of Alice’. She is fascinated by childhood and the way adults have the ability, at … More »
By Mark Twain
Climb aboard the raft with Huck and Jim and drift away from the “sivilized” life and into a world of adventure, excitement, danger, and self-discovery. Huck’s shrewd and humorous narrative is complemented by lyrical descriptions of the Mississippi valley and a sparkling cast of memorable characters. More »
One of the world’s first best-sellers, this tragic masterpiece attained an instant and lasting success upon its 1774 publication. A sensitive exploration of the mind of a young artist, the tale addresses age-old questions — the meaning of love, of death, and the possibility of redemption — in … More »
By Muriel Spark
At the staid Marcia Blaine School for Girls, in Edinburgh, Scotland, teacher extraordinaire Miss Jean Brodie is unmistakably, and outspokenly, in her prime. She is passionate in the application of her unorthodox teaching methods, in her attraction to the married art master, Teddy Lloyd, in her affair with … More »
By Voltaire
Candide is the most famous of Voltaire’s “philosophical tales,” in which he combined witty improbabilities with the sanest of good sense. First published in 1759, it was an instant bestseller and has come to be regarded as one of the key texts of the Enlightenment. … More »
The classic novel by William GoldingWith a new Introduction by Stephen King”To me Lord of the Flies has always represented what novels are for, what makes them indispensable.” -Stephen KingGolding’s classic, startling, and perennially bestselling portrait of human nature remains as provocative today as when it … More »
By George Eliot
Falsely accused, cut off from his past, Silas the weaver is reduced to a spider-like existence, endlessly weaving his web and hoarding his gold. Meanwhile, Godfrey Cass, son of the squire, contracts a secret marriage. While the village celebrates Christmas and New Year, two apparently inexplicable events occur. … More »
By Andre Gide
‘To know how to free oneself is nothing; the arduous thing is to know what to do with one’s freedom’ – Andre Gide. Michel had been a blindfold scholar until, newly married, he contracted tuberculosis. His will to recover brings self-discovery and the growing desire to rebel against … More »
By Emile Zola
In a dingy apartment on the Passage du Pont-Neuf in Paris, Thérèse Raquin is trapped in a loveless marriage to her sickly cousin, Camille. The numbing tedium of her life is suddenly shattered when she embarks on a turbulent affair with her husband’s earthy friend Laurent, but their … More »
“Suitably disturbing—and a pleasure to read.” — The ScotsmanIn this, his last novel, José Saramago daringly reimagines the characters and narratives of the Old Testament, recalling his provocative The Gospel According to Jesus Christ. His tale runs from the Garden of Eden, when God realizes he has forgotten … More »
“The most beautiful love story in the world.”—Louis AragonThe Second World War is raging, and Jamilia’s husband is off fighting at the front. Accompanied by Daniyar, a sullen newcomer who was wounded on the battlefield, Jamilia spends her days hauling sacks of grain from the threshing floor to … More »
First published in Russian in 1974, Live and Remember was immediately hailed by Soviet critics as a superb if atypical example of war literature and a moving depiction of the degradation and ultimate damnation of a frontline deserter. The novel tells the story of a Siberian peasant who … More »
By Thomas Mann
Thomas Mann is widely acknowledged as the greatest German novelist of this century. His 1912 novella Death in Venice is the most frequently read example of Mann’s early work. Clayton Koelb’s masterful translation improves upon its predecessors in two ways: it renders Mann into American (not British) English, … More »
By Jon Krakauer
In April 1992 a young man from a well-to-do family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. His name was Christopher Johnson McCandless. He had given $25,000 in savings to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the … More »
Filed under Humor and Observations, Writing
Rough day in Phoenix, Arizona. Eighty degrees and sunny. That’s about 40 degrees for you Celsius folks. Here is a picture of the aftermath of our severe winter storms…
Filed under Humor and Observations
Despite our modern technologically savvy ways, sometimes the best art is made through the simplest mediums. Take artist Hikaru Cho, for example, who paints imaginative scenes directly onto human bodies. Refusing to use Photoshop, Cho challenges herself to create realistic scenes with her bare hands. Hers is a work-intensive process that produces a realistic interplay between the real and the illustrated, and onlookers are immediately impressed by her work. If Cho merely printed computer-generated doodles onto paper and taped them to her subjects’ bodies, her work would not look as believable and would not leave so large an impression in her followers’ memories.
Karla Mialynne is another meticulous artist who enjoys using old school mediums. Most often using only pencils, pens, watercolors and inks Mialynne creates photorealistic illustrations of random objects, animals and even people. It would be hard not to mistake Mialynne’s illustrations for photographs if she didn’t document each drawing beside the tools she used to create it.
This celebration of simplicity and love for painstaking work have earned Mialynne a place in our list of favorite artists. You can find some of Mialynne’s illustrations below, and visit her Tumblr for a behind-the-scenes look at her creative process.
Filed under Humor and Observations, Uncategorized
By Tia Ghose
Published January 10, 2014
An artist’s rendering of Bandringa, a 310 million-year-old shark originally found in fossil deposits from Mazon Creek, Illinois. (Painting by John Megahan, University of Michigan.)
Stunningly preserved baby sharks with bizarre, long snouts as well as egg cases from the same species may be the oldest convincing evidence of an ancient shark nursery.
The fossils date to about 310 million years ago.
In unpublished work on egg casings found in Germany, paleontologists have inferred the presence of another ancient shark nursery that is 330 million years old, but “this is the first time we have eggs and fossilized hatchlings in the same place, proving it’s a shark nursery,” said study co-author Lauren Sallan, a paleontologist at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
‘It has these giant, needle-like spines on the top of its head and cheeks.’
– study co-author Lauren Sallan
The new research, detailed Tuesday in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, also revealed that even back then, the sharks, known as Bandringas, migrated to spawn. [8 Weird Facts About Sharks
]
The study also revealed new details about the oddball creature’s anatomy, including a long snout studded with electrical receptors and spines on its head and cheeks.
Known entity The Bandringa fossils were discovered in a coal mine in Mazon Creek, Ill., in 1969. The primitive sharks which had long, spoon-shaped snouts started out as babies measuring just 4 to 6 inches (10 to 15 centimeters) long and eventually grew to be about 10 feet long.
Over time, researchers discovered many other fossils that looked somewhat different from the Mazon Creek specimens, and concluded they were two separate species of Bandringa.
But Sallan and co-author Michael Coates, a biologist at the University of Chicago, went back to museum collections to take a second look at 24 of these fossils. They found that all of the shark fossils were the same species, but the marine samples had preserved the bone, whereas the freshwater samples had preserved soft tissue and cartilage, making them look somewhat different.
Migratory behavior The eggs and hatchlings were found only in the Mazon Creek site, whereas fossils of teenage sharks were found upstream in a river in Ohio, and full-grown sharks were found in Pennsylvania.
The new information suggests the sharks spent different phases of their lives in distinct locations, Sallan said.
About 300 million years ago, much of the area that makes up the present-day midwestern United States was covered by a vast inland sea. The sharks probably laid their eggs along the shoreline of that sea, in present-day Illinois, and when the hatchlings matured, they made their way through a network of rivers to a giant freshwater basin farther east, she said.
New anatomy Some of the specimens’ scaly skin was preserved, as was pigment from the iris of the eye, Sallan said.
By combining the detail found in both the soft tissue and the bone, the team was also able to learn new details about the strange creature’s anatomy.
“It has these giant, needle-like spines on the top of its head and cheeks,” probably to defend against other predators living above it, Sallan told LiveScience.
The new study also revealed that the Bandringas’ snouts were studded with tiny receptors. The bottom-feeders used these receptors to sense the electrical activity of prey in the murky shoreline waters, and then used their vacuum-like mouths to suction up those prey, the studied showed.
Not proven yet Except for examples such as mating insects frozen in time, it’s very difficult to infer the behavior of long-dead species.
But the careful work provides “convincing evidence to support the hypothesis that these rocks preserve a shark nursery from 300 million years ago,” Mark Purnell, a paleobiologist at the University of Leicester in England, who was not involved in the study, wrote in an email.
But not everyone is fully convinced that the findings are evidence of nurseries and shark migration.
“The arguments are cogently presented, but they should be treated cautiously,” said John Maisey, a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York who was not involved in the study.
For instance, sharks of all ages may have lived in all of these environments, but certain environments may simply have preserved the soft tissue of baby animals better, whereas others could have made whole-body preservation of adults more likely, Maisey said.
Filed under Humor and Observations
By Tia Ghose
Published January 13, 2014
New DNA analysis of a bone fragment found in an Indian Church suggest that the relic belongs to Queen Ketevan, who was martyred in the 1600s. (Wikimedia Commons)
The remains of a woman kept in an Indian church likely belong to an ancient queen executed about 400 years ago, a new DNA analysis suggests.
The DNA analysis suggests the remains are those of Queen Ketevan, an ancient Georgian queen who was executed for refusing to become a member of a powerful Persian ruler’s harem. The findings are detailed in the January issue of the journal Mitochondrion.
Tumultuous life Ketevan was the Queen of Kakheti, a kingdom in Georgia, in the 1600s. After her husband the king was killed, the Persian Ruler, Shah Abbas I, besieged the kingdom.
“Shah Abbas I led an army to conquer the Georgian kingdom and took Queen Ketevan as prisoner,” said study co-author Niraj Rai, a researcher at the Center for Cellular and Molecular Biology in Hyderabad, India.
‘[It’s] the first genetic evidence for the sample being a relic of Saint Queen Ketevan.’
– Niraj Rai, a researcher at the Center for Cellular and Molecular Biology in Hyderabad, India
Queen Ketevan languished in Shiraz, Iran, for about a decade. But in 1624, Shah Abbas asked the queen to convert to Islam from Christianity and join his harem. She refused, and he had her tortured, then executed on Sept. 22, 1624. Ketevan the Martyr was canonized as a saint by the Georgian Orthodox Church shortly after. [Saintly? The 10 Most Controversial Miracles]
Missing relics Before her death, Queen Ketevan had befriended two Augustinian friars who became devoted to her. Legend had it that, in 1627, the two friars secretly dug up her remains and smuggled them out of the country. An ancient Portuguese document suggested her bones were held in a black sarcophagus kept in the window of the St. Augustinian Convent in Goa, India.
But the centuries had not been kind to the church: Part of the convent had collapsed and many valuables had been sold off in the intervening centuries. Early attempts to find her remains failed.
But starting in 2004, Rai and colleagues excavated an area they believed contained the remains and found a broken arm bone and two other bone fragments, as well as pieces of black boxes.
Rare lineage To find out if the bones belonged to the martyred queen, the researchers extracted mitochondrial DNA, or DNA found only in the cytoplasm of an egg that is passed on through the maternal line.
The arm bone once belonged to a female with a genetic lineage, or haplogroup, known as U1b, the analysis showed. In a survey of 22,000 people from the Indian subcontinent, the researchers found none with U1b lineage. By contrast, the lineage was fairly common in a sample of 30 people from Georgia.
The other two bones showed evidence they were part of genetic lineages common in India, which supported documents suggesting the queen’s relics were stored in a room with the bones of two local friars.
“The complete absence of haplogroup U1b in the Indian subcontinent and its presence in high-to-moderate frequency in the Georgia and adjoining regions, provide the first genetic evidence for the [arm bone] sample being a relic of Saint Queen Ketevan of Georgia,” Rai told LiveScience.
The study is well done and honest, Jean-Jacques Cassiman, a geneticist at the University of Leuven in Belgium who was not involved in the study, wrote in an email.
“It is a bone presumed to be of the queen and will remain so until its DNA can be compared to that of preferably living relatives and if not available dead relatives,” Cassiman said, referring to nuclear DNA that is in all the body’s cells.
But until that point, the conclusion is based on statistics. Those statistics strengthen the idea that the bone belongs to St. Ketevan, but aren’t strong enough to positively identify the remnant, Cassiman said.
Filed under Humor and Observations
More cute dogs to get you through the start of the week.
Filed under Animals
Here are some more unusual art sculptures for you to enjoy.
Bruno Catalano was born in 1960 in southern France. This current series is called “Les Voyageurs” and was displayed in Marseilles as the city was the European Capital of Culture in 2013. His aim is to capture audience’s attention and with this series he surely did. By creating sculptures with missing parts the spectator is momentarily puzzled but when she or he understands the whole concept relaxes and enjoys the scene. Remarkable sculptures. Enjoy the rest of the series.
[via]
Filed under Humor and Observations, Uncategorized
Agni (Sanskrit name meaning “fire”) is the newest hatchling of a recently discovered species in Indonesia. He was given the name by members of the initial research team because of his red wing coloring. While local Zoologists (scientists who study and classify animals) are hesitant to use the name “Dragon”, there is an unmistakable resemblance between this new species and the mythical dragons of ancient lore.
Barely a week old, Agni can expect to triple his current size within a month based on his current growth rate. He currently feeds mainly on insects but will soon graduate to small rodents and birds.
Adult specimens have remained elusive, although clues of their existence have been spotted in the local region where Agni was found. It is believed that the adults remain in hibernation for most of the year, only emerging occasionally to hunt for food.
The first question one is likely to ask is whether these creatures have the ability to “breathe” fire like the dragons in movies and fairy tales. While no concrete evidence of this is available, it is noted that the region of protected forestland where Agni resides has an unusually high number of “scorch plots” as seen below. A scorch plot is a portion of land, small or large, that has been scorched or burned. Usually they are caused by lightning, but the more frequent presence of these scorched areas in this region indicates another cause.
The story of how this discovery came about starts with the disappearance of about 15 cattle from a ranch that had recently expanded its territory near a protected wildlife habitat.
It was first assumed that the disappearances were due to the activity of large cats roaming out of the protected forestland to find food. But it soon became evident that this was not the case when no feline tracks could be found anywhere in the area.
In fact no tracks of any kind could be found going in or out of the rancher’s territory that would explain the loss of 15 cattle.
The missing cattle could not have left by land. The only explanation left was that they were taken by air. In the absence of a fleet of helicopters to cart them off, the situation seemed an unsolvable mystery until wildlife researchers in the local preserve came across a collection of cattle bones strewn across a walking path.
A scientific investigation was undertaken to get to the bottom of this when the following was discovered along with several other already hatched eggs:
Agni as well as several of his siblings have been found and are undergoing observation by local scientists in their natural habitat in order to gather more information about their behavior and feeding habits.
The search continues for an adult specimen, although with 2 researchers assigned to this project having gone missing already, this appears to be more of a dangerous undertaking than originally anticipated.
No other signs of the missing cattle have been found nor any clues to the exact whereabouts of the adult dragons, although researchers on the project appear determined to continue until the mystery is solved once and for all.
Note: To prevent the unlawful hunting or poaching of these animals and for the protection of the researchers involved, names and specific locations have been omitted.
Dragons. Are they real? Have the mythical creatures of children’s stories been here all along, hiding in the deep jungle under our very noses?
If so, why have they only recently been discovered? Were dragons once abundant and thriving across the globe, only to be hunted into near extinction as ancient tales tell us? If so, why were they hunted? For sport? Or do these creatures represent a threat to mankind?
Source:
Disclaimer:
The views and opinions expressed on topinfopost.com are soley those of the original authors and our contributors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent topinfopost.com or it’s staff.
Filed under Animals, Humor and Observations
