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Treating teen trauma, preventing violence
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Legends have come down to us from ancient times about dead bodies that rise from the grave to terrorize the living. That's where we get the concept of vampires, zombies, and revenants. But fear of the dead goes back much further, to the Neolithic era, as we find more burials that have been engineered to keep a body from rising again. As these finds get older and older, we have to think about why we bury the dead in the first place. Deliberate burials go back at least 100,000 years, although archaeologists still argue about how deliberate some of these graveyards really were. And burial practices of ancient humans are hard to discern. Were stones placed on top of graves to keep animals from digging them up, or to keep the dead from coming back to haunt us?
Different burial sites have vastly different customs, which come from the dominant culture, but some graves even in the same graveyard appear to have extra steps that make this one burial different from those around it. What do these burial customs say about the way that person was regarded? Or were they "pinned down" so that they couldn't rise up and spread the disease that killed them? Read about the research into the long history of our fear of the dead returning at Aeon. -via Real Clear Science
(Image credit: Alissa Mittnik, Chuan-Chao Wang, Jiří Svoboda, Johannes Krause)
Since my last reading post:
Nobody Cares, by H. J. Breedlove. This one is good, but dark: it's dedicated this to Black Lives Matter, and fairly early on I got to the first mention of Missing and murdered indigenous women and girls. It's also book 3 in the Talkeetna series, with further developments in the friendship-turning-romance of Dace and Paul.
The Disappearing Spoon, by Dan Kean: a history of the periodic table, with a bit about each of the currently-known elements and the people, or groups of people who discovered them. Someone recommended this after I mentioned liking Consider the Fork, but the two books have almost nothing in common.
The Electricity of Every Living Thing, by Katherine May: a memoir, about walking and what happens after the writer hears a radio program about Asperger's and thinks "but that's me." (I don't remember where I saw this recommended
Return to Gone-Away, by Elizabeth Enright: read-aloud, and a reread of a book I read years ago. Sweet, a family's low-key adventures in an obscure corner of upstate New York. As the title implies, this is a sequel; read Gone-Away Lake first.
Beautiful Yetta, the Yiddish Chicken, by Daniel Pinkwater, a short picture book that we read aloud after Adrian and I realized Cattitude hadn't read it before. Conversation in three languages, with translations (and transliterations) for the Yiddish and Spanish. Not Pinkwater's best, but fun.
Thimble Summer, by Elizabeth Enright, because I enjoyed rereading the Gone-Away Lake books. Several months of a girl's life with her family on a farm. The plot and adventures are relatively low-key. I liked it, and am glad I got it from the library.
Also, it looks as though I didn't post about the summer reading thing here. It started June 1, and the bingo card has a mix of kinds of books, like books in translation, published this year, or with an indigenous author; some squares with things like "read outside" and "recommend a book"; and some that go further afield, like "learn a word in a new language" and "try a new recipe." Plus the ever-popular "book with a green cover." (OK, last year it was "book with a red cover.") I do a lot of my reading on a black-and-white kindle, so I don't know what color the covers might be. Therefore, I walked into a library yesterday, looked at their summer reading suggestions, and grabbed a book with a green cover.
The sixth film in The Karate Kid franchise is in theaters now. Karate Kid: Legends brings Ralph Macchio and Jackie Chan together. Chan's character was also in the 2010 movie The Karate Kid, starring Jaden Smith, which was a remake with the same plot as the 1984 original, except it took place in China. The movie did well, but you might be surprised to learn that it was the highest grossing of all the Karate Kid films. That's because it was not only set in China, it was a hit in China.
But what was shown in China was not quite the same movie. Knowing how lucrative the Chinese market could be, the producers of The Karate Kid bent over backwards to get the film in Chinese theaters. For one thing, there is no karate in China, it is kung fu, so the movie was titled Gong Fu Meng (Kung Fu Dream). It was edited differently from the American version, with the spotlight on Chinese movie stars who got little screen time in the American version. Some plot points were changed, too, to please Chinese censors. Read up on how The Karate Kid was changed for the Chinese audience at Den of Geek.
Picture me: sat on the sofa, opposite the French doors, vaguely paying attention to what was going on at the bird feeder, mildly amused by the extremely ungainly magpie.
The magpie that inspected the water bowl (that someone had thrown off its stand) and the feeder (that was empty) and the me (on the sofa) and Came To A Decision.
It did a tiny hop-skip-flap over and landed, very deliberately, on the workbench just the other side of the glass. It turned its head from side to side to get a good look at me from both eyes.
And then, having glared at me, it started yelling.
And kept yelling until I was up off the sofa and clearly heading for the door, whereupon it retreated to a safe distance, i.e. the garage rooves, and Continued Observing.
I sorted out the water dish. I got the crates of Misc Birdseed out of their cupboard. I sorted out the feeder. I sorted out the other feeder.
I went back inside.
Some time elapsed.
Eventually I got sufficiently puzzled about why the magpie hadn't come back yet to actually notice that I'd left the crates of seed out, and their cupboard door open.
I heaved myself back off the sofa.
I returned the seeds to their cupboard, and shut the cupboard's door. I returned myself to the sofa, shutting the patio door behind me.
Not terribly long after that, the magpie returned, and drank, and nibbled suspiciously (I had changed which food was in which feeder position), and appeared satisfied at least to the extent of not yelling any further...
... right up until the squirrel showed up to claim a portion of the restock.
I am absolutely delighted to have made this neighbour's acquaintance.
I never thought about the fact that Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Free Bird" didn't have a music video. See, in 1973 when the song was new, music videos weren't a thing. It was another ten years before MTV came along, and by then we had concert footage and memories to go with the song. Well now, the band has an official music video for "Free Bird." It's nothing like what you thought of the song at the time, but it's perfect for 2025.
If there were a music video produced for the song back in the 1970s, it would probably have had a visual representation of the lyrics, about a guy who couldn't stay in a relationship because he was had to fly away and enjoy his freedom. Instead, this video evokes the emotions and memories that people of a certain age (like the members of Lynyrd Skynyrd) have when they hear the song. "Free Bird" was a part of the soundtrack of your life 50 years ago, a rather magical time for those who were there. (via Laughing Squid)