#books written by chan chandler

[bookloversofbath]

Tail Gunner: 98 Raids in World War II -::- Chan Chandler

Tail Gunner: 98 Raids in World War II -::- Chan Chandler lands on the shelves of my shop.

Shrewsbury: Airlife Publishing Ltd., 1999, Hardback in dust wrapper.

2nd impression, first edition 1999. Contains: Black & white photographs; Tables;

From the cover: By the close of the Second World War, Flight Lieutenant Chan Chandler had flown a remarkable 98 missions, 65 of them with No 49 Squadron and 28…

[lilaccatholic]

Ugh, this article from Vanity Fair (copied below the cut for those of you who have run out of free articles for the month) about how many old Hollywood stars were forced into abortions to keep up their “images”—with some of them being absolutely destroyed by the procedure—is absolutely horrifying. How anyone can look at this and not see how these poor women were abused and manipulated is beyond me.

Abortions were our birth control,” an anonymous actress once said about the common procedure’s place in Hollywood from the 1920s through the 1950s. While patriarchal political powers connive to block women’s legal access to abortion in 21st century America, in Old Hollywood, abortions were far more standard and far more accessible than they often are today—more like aspirin, or appendectomies. How and why did a procedure that was taboo and illegal at the time become so ordinary—at least, among a certain set? 

Much like today, in Old Hollywood, the decisions being made about women’s bodies were made in the interests of men—the powerful heads of motion pictures studios MGM, Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros., and RKO. As Aubrey Malone writes in Hollywood's Second Sex: The Treatment of Women in the Film Industry, 1900-1999, “If you want to play in this business, you play like a man or you’re out. And if you happen to be a woman, better not mention it to anybody.”

From the very infancy of America’s film industry, abortions were necessary body maintenance for women in the spotlight. Birth control, including prophylactics, were about as new as “stars” themselves—movie performers who went overnight from being “Little Mary” or “The Vitagraph Girl” to “America’s Sweetheart” or “Sex Goddess.”

“These newly wealthy men and women didn’t know how to control their money, their bodies, or their lives, spending, cavorting, and reveling in excess,” writes Anne Helen Petersen in Scandals of Classic Hollywood. In the working environment of the Hollywood studio system, society’s 19th-century sexual segregation had fallen away. Women—flappers, It girls, sirens and seductresses—were spared their destiny in the kitchen, and for the first time, they earned large incomes they could spend on whatever and whomever they wished. Many believed the publicity they read about their own erotic powers, and they went toe-to-toe professionally with men. Sparks were bound to fly.

And so it became necessary for the studios to implement reformatory measures to prevent stars from destroying their value through scandal. In 1922, Will H. Hays Hays collaborated with studios to introduce mandatory “morality clauses” into stars’ contracts. Consequently an unintended pregnancy would not only bring shame to these top box-office earners—it would violate studio policy. “[I]t was a common assumption that glamorous stars would not be popular if they had children,” writes Cari Beauchamp in her book on powerful women in Old Hollywood, Without Lying Down.

These clauses may have extended to an actress’s right to marry. According to Petersen, rumor had it that “Blonde Bombshell” Jean Harlow couldn’t wed William Powell because “MGM had written a clause into her contract forbidding her to marry”—a wife couldn’t be a “bombshell,” after all. When Harlow became pregnant from the affair, she called MGM head of publicity Howard Strickling in a panic. Shortly thereafter, according to E.J. Fleming in The Fixers: Eddie Mannix, Howard Strickling and the MGM Publicity Machine, “Mrs. Jean Carpenter” entered Good Shepherd Hospital “to get some rest.” She was seen only by her private doctors and nurses in room 826, the same room she had occupied the year before for an “appendectomy.”

In the 1930s, vamp and man-eating thespian Tallulah Bankhead got “abortions like other women got permanent waves,” biographer Lee Israel quips in Miss Tallulah Bankhead. When virtuous singing sensation Jeanette McDonald found herself pregnant in 1935, MGM studio boss Louis B. Mayer told Strickling to “get rid of the problem.” McDonald soon checked into a hospital with an “ear infection,” according to Fleming’s The Fixers.

Many of these Silent Sex Goddesses either fell victim to their own hedonism, fell out of favor, or burned out, such as Theda Bara and Clara Bow. Others, like Joan Crawford, kept going. Kenneth Anger writes that Crawford was a “gutsy jazz baby” who marched through the “twin holocaust of the Talkies/Crash unscathed” to escape her dirt-poor origins. “Joan knew where she came from,” he continues, “and did not want to go back there.”

Get 1 year for $15.Join Now In 1931 Joan Crawford, estranged from her husband Douglas Fairbanks Jr., became pregnant with what she believed was Clark Gable’s child and Strickling arranged for an abortion. Rather than reveal the truth, Crawford told Fairbanks that during the filming of Rain on Catalina Island, she slipped on the deck of a ship and lost the baby.

Crawford’s rival Bette Davis also willingly chose to have abortions for the sake of her career. Davis was the breadwinner for her entire family—her mother and sister, and her husband, Harmon Nelson, whom she married in 1932. If she’d had a child in 1934, she told her biographer Charlotte Chandler in The Girl Who Walked Home Alone, she would’ve “missed the biggest role in her life thus far”—that of Mildred in Of Human Bondage, which earned Davis her first Oscar nomination. Other great parts—“Jezebel, Judith, Elizabeth, Charlotte, and Margo Channing”—may not have followed, either. “But I didn’t miss any of these roles, and I didn’t miss having a family,” she said. Later in life, Davis had three children.

Her first child, Barbara Davis Sherry—known as B.D.—was born when Davis was 39. As biographer Whitney Stine notes in I’d Love to Kiss You: Conversations with Bette Davis, “she was proud of the fact that, after her abortions, she could have a baby at last and a career, because her mother had always insisted that she couldn’t have both. She never tired of reminding [her mother] that she could be a mother and an actress.”

“A child could wait; her career could not.” That’s the reasoning Jean Harlow’s mother gave about her daughter’s own abortion at age 18. Ava Gardner, too, expressed a similar sentiment when discussing her abortion, which she had when married to Frank Sinatra—unbeknownst to him. “‘MGM had all sorts of penalty clauses about their stars having babies,’” Jane Ellen Wayne quotes Gardner saying in The Golden Girls of MGM. “‘If I had one, my salary would be cut off. So how could I make a living? Frank was broke and my future movies were going to take me all over the world. I couldn’t have a baby with that sort of thing going on. MGM made all the arrangements for me to fly to London. Someone from the studio was with me all the time. The abortion was hush hush . . . very discreet.’”

But things didn’t work out quite so well for Judy Garland. Famous primarily for playing Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz and struggling to maintain both her weight and her image as an ingenue, Garland was never free to make her own choices.

“Married or not, the MGM girls maintained their virginal image,” Wayne observes, and this was especially true of Garland. In 1941, at age 19, she married the bandleader David Rose without the approval of MGM, and within 24 hours was ordered back by to work. When she became pregnant by Rose, her mother, Ethel, in cahoots with the studio, arranged for Garland to have an abortion. Audiences loved her as a child—not as a mother. In 1943, Garland became pregnant from her affair with Tyrone Power, according to Petersen. Strickling arranged for her to have an abortion. Arguably, these incidents affected Garland psychologically; eventually she became the first public victim of stardom.

Tyrone Power also got Lana Turner pregnant. Again, Strickling arranged for an abortion. Power was one of a constellation of male stars—such as Errol Flynn, Clark Gable, and Charlie Chaplin—whose unbridled dalliances left women paying the price, according to The Fixers. (The phrase “In like Flynn” alludes to Errol’s ease at bedding women—and his good fortune at being acquitted of statutory rape of two teenage girls.)

Strickling, who was by now referred to as a “fixer,” had his hands full with Turner. The “Sweater Girl” allegedly found herself pregnant by bandleader Artie Shaw in 1941, and Strickling arranged an abortion during her publicity tour of Hawaii. The procedure took place without anesthesia, on her hotel bed. Turner’s mother covered her mouth with her hand to stifle her daughter’s cries. A studio doctor, paid $500 that was then deducted from Turner’s paycheck, performed the procedure. A week later, she was back on set filming Ziegfeld Girl, according to The Fixers.

Some actresses struggled with whether or not to keep their child. Mexican screen siren Lupe Velez committed suicide in 1944 because she was pregnant by her lover Harald Ramond, who wouldn’t marry her. A devout Catholic, she declined to call “Doctor Killkare” (“the joke name for Tinseltown’s leading abortionist,” according to Kenneth Anger in Hollywood Babylon), and downed 75 Seconal instead, according to Hollywood Babylon.

The decision was equally tragic for Dorothy Dandridge. Otto Preminger had directed her in Carmen Jones and made her a star. When she became pregnant by him in 1955, he refused to divorce his wife and marry her. Dandridge was forced to have an abortion; the studio demanded it, according to Scandals of Classic Hollywood, not only because a child would compromise her image as the sexy Carmen Jones, but also because Preminger was a white man. And, while miscegenation laws were repealed in California in 1948, nationwide they were still very much in place.

Ironically, the rebel of her day was Loretta Young—not because she had an abortion, but because she refused to have one. A devout Catholic, Young journeyed abroad in 1935 to recuperate from a ‘mystery illness,’ after she found herself with child by Clark Gable under shady circumstances—and avoided the press. She gave birth to her daughter at home in Los Angeles. Young initially gave the child up for adoption—and then, a few months later, officially adopted her, according to The Fixers.

In the heyday of the Hollywood studio system, women were at their most desirable and their most powerful—but it still didn’t afford them the right to choose when it came to governing their bodies. Hollywood’s production codes extended to women’s reproduction. In the hundred years or so that have passed since the birth of American cinema, everything has changed—though, then again, perhaps nothing has.

[professorpalmarosa]

Weird Nutmeg Dream: The Chris Chan Escape Room

This is not the first time I have chronicled a weird dream brought on by diffusing Nutmeg Essential Oil. If you diffuse the correct amount, you increase your chances of having a lucid dream...or at least something fun and interesting.

Too much, and you’ll end up with dreams about bees building hives on the other side of your window or psychic hipsters with man-buns stealing your identity so you’ll kill everyone he hates with your brainwaves.

Wednesday night, I had a real doozy...

In this dream, one of my old high school friends had just turned 30. To celebrate, they wanted to get a big group together to play a brand new room at an escape room company close to my city’s amusement park. I was eager to play for a number of reasons:

I love escape rooms. I played my first one in 2016 and have been hooked ever since.

I have played two escape rooms at this facility already. Their rooms don’t have the ambient lighting, expensive sets, and mood music like my favorite place does; but their puzzles tend to be trickier (and honestly, sometimes pretty funny).

The engineer who owns the company and designs the rooms is a very nice guy. Once you finish a room, he loves to nerd out and explain how he constructed the room, how the puzzles work, etc. He also has a cool “replay room” where you can watch your gameplay. Sometimes, he’ll slow it down. Other times, he’ll speed it up and play Yakety Sax from the Benny Hill Show.

This was a brand new room. Only two groups had beaten the room so far, but no one had successfully unlocked the “special bonus ending” yet. That probably thrilled me more than anything else.

My group arrives on time and we’re all eager to find out what the theme of the room is. I try to weasel some information out of the owner, but he’s being uncharacteristically mum about all of this. That’s when our “guide” steps out to greet us.

He’s a chubby fellow dressed in a blue and red striped rugby shirt, a pair of blue jeans with a stain near his fly, a pair of thick glasses, an amethyst high school ring…and something around his neck that gives away what the theme of the room will be. My friends are confused and more than a little grossed out by the stain, but it’s all I can do to hold in my nervous giggling.

‘Oh my god,’ I realize. ‘It’s a Chris Chan escape room.’

For those unfamiliar with who Chris Chan is, Christine Weston Chandler (formerly Christopher/Christian Weston Chandler) is a high-functioning autistic internet personality famous for creating Sonichu: a hybrid between Sonic the Hedgehog and Pikachu. She occasionally releases comics; but nowhere near as frequently as she once did. This is due to stress, repeated harassment from online trolls, financial problems, and a deteriorating mental state due to all of the aforementioned.

Her life is pretty much what would happen if the Truman Show were real…if Truman was autistic and the show was 100% guest-written by internet trolls. Everything she does is chronicled by “Christorians” and broken up into sagas. Sagas are typically categorized by personal life events, failed romantic relationships with (sometimes real, sometimes fake) women, and whatever troll/trolling group is harassing her at present.

As a side note, I know that Christine’s preferred pronouns are now she/her. When speaking about her in the present tense, I will use those. However, since (1) this room dealt with Chris almost a decade before the transition was announced and (2) even Christine herself tends to treat the past Chris as a separate entity (she even kicks him in the nuts in the Sonichu comics, if I remember correctly); I’ll be using he/him for the purposes of the dream. This room was designed around Chris, not Christine.

I don’t have an account on the Kiwi Farms, nor have I ever contributed any articles or attempted to contact Chris. However, I’ve been following Chris’s antics for nearly ten years and fancy myself to be a bit of a closeted amateur Christorian.

No one in my group knew this and it was about to become relevant.

“Hello, ladies and gentlemen, girls and boys, and dudes of all teen ages!” Fake-Chris greeted us. I’m trying my best not to crack up because I recognize that quote. I know where this is going. The actor does not disappoint. “My name is Christian Weston Chandler. I’m here, and y’all are there!”

My poor friends look like they’ve just crash landed onto an alien (Little Big) planet. They have no clue what hell they’ve just unleashed, but it only get crazier from there. I won’t go into the full specifics of what the actor said—again, this was a dream and not reality. Some of the details are hazy now that I’m awake—but I’ll go ahead and tell you what the general premise for the Chris Chan escape room was:

The Sonichu medallion around Chris’s neck was a copy. He wanted to give the original to a “sweetheart” he was courting online, but he lost it somewhere in his room. Just to humor the actor, I asked who the sweetheart was.

Fake-Chris’s face lit up with glee, probably because a real girl was talking to him. “Blanca Weiss,” he tells me giddily. “Blanca’s real. Yeah. I talked to her!”

By now, most of my friends are having second thoughts about entering that room. The actor has creeped out most of the ladies in my party, as well as my gender nonconforming friend who is really uncomfortable when people make comments about their chest. They haven’t had top surgery yet and it’s a very sensitive subject.

There was one more twist for the plot of the room: Chris believed one of us wasn’t being “true and honest” and was, in fact, a troll from the internet. This brings me back to the “special bonus ending” I mentioned earlier. Each group of players would have one troll among them. This person would have a slightly different objective from the other players.

All of us were tasked with finding the Sonichu medallion, but the “troll” player would need to:

Go undetected by Chris and the other players for the entirety of the game.

Find the Sonichu medallion.

Steal the Sonichu medallion from the rest of the party.

Leave the room before the hour was up.

If the troll could successfully do this, they would be rewarded with a free full booking of another room. Escape rooms tend to run anywhere from $15 to $25 per person in my city, so that’s about a $250 value! I don’t care who the hell the troll is in my group is. I’m not going to dox them because I want the free game.

In an attempt to convince my wary friends to move forward with the game, I reassured them that I’d probably be able to catch most of the inside jokes in the room. “I know my Christory, guys.” They looked at me like I was speaking a foreign language. “I know this stuff! We can do this!”

Unfortunately, my enthusiasm and can-do attitude bit me in the ass. Not only had I outed myself as some kind of online weirdo to my friends, but Fake-Chris proceeded to hit on me for most of the game. Initially, he tried his best to give every player an equal amount of interaction. I guess he noticed the other people in the room were uncomfortable and I seemed “nice.” I was asked multiple times if I was “boyfriend-free.” (Spoiler alert: I am, but that’s because I’m a super choosy and super, super gay.)

I was right. My Christory knowledge came into play multiple times during the game play. There were puzzles based on:

The “Gitars of Fail” (Guitar Hero guitars Chris customized after Sonichu and Meatwad from Aqua Teen Hunger Force, just to name a couple)

The Sailor Moon poster Chris used to look at every day to reaffirm his “straightness”

Rearranging the members of the Chaotic Combo in chronological order of their first appearance in the Sonichu comics. Their Amibos were spread around the room and needed to be placed in that order, otherwise a box with a magnetic lock wouldn’t open.

The Orange Fanta cans. If you don’t already know what those are for, you DON’T want to know.

The Sonic Totem

The Pixelblock Heart Torch

The “Yep! I’m on TV!” DVD.

The “Wall of Originals” custom Pokémon cards.

Chris & the Hedgehog Boys. My guy pal Patrick had to sing a rendition of “So Need a Cute Girl” and it was godawful.

Finding the one game in Chris’s massive collection where one of the characters was incorrectly colored (Sonic Boom, which Chris doesn’t own. Chris boycotted that game and even pepper sprayed a Gamestop employee).

A scavenger hunt inside the Manchester High School Year 2000 Yearbook. We had to look at every gal pal.

Having to pull half a key out of Officer Nasty and another half out of Kimmi: Chris’s inflatable sex dolls.

A DDR Mat that (once the four combination locks were unlocked) opened a portal to CWCVille. The four codes were SONICHU, ROSECHU, NAITSIRHC, and CLYDECASH.

One of my friends found the Sonichu medallion inside the CWCville portal. It was hidden inside an empty jug of OxyClean. I heard several cases of “oh thank Christ” muttered among my friends. I could tell they were having fun in here, but were ready to leave.There was just one problem:

Someone had to give the medallion back to Fake-Chris and none of my friends wanted to talk to him.

The clock was running out and Fake-Chris had become increasingly paranoid. “Aw, come on!” he kept whining, sweating and panting as he made grabby hands for the medallion.

“Okay,” I told my friends as I held out my hand. “I know none of you want to do it. Give me the medallion. I’ll take care of this.” My friend handed over the medallion without a second thought, but I didn’t head toward the actor.

I headed toward the door. I was the troll all along.

[weekendwarriorblog]

The Weekend Warrior 12/11/20 - MINARI, THE MIDNIGHT SKY, LET THEM ALL TALK, WILD MOUNTAIN THYME, PARALLEL, WANDER DARKLY and More!

Honestly, I almost didn’t write a column this week for reasons I’ll probably be ranting about for a few more months, but the long and short of it is that I’ve now been writing movie reviews for 19 years, as well as writing a weekly column through most of that time, and I’m kind of sick of working my ass off, usually for very little money, and just not getting anything out of it.

This mainly came as I crossed 200 reviews for the year a few weeks back. As I was preparing to write this week’s column, Rotten Tomatoes, where most of my reviews have been available as FREE content for the past 17 years, decided to upgrade a number of critics to be “Top Critics”… but not yours truly. I have a lot more to say about this but don’t want to waste any more of my time or anger right now. I will be wrapping this column up and taking some time off for a month in January and deciding whether I want to keep wasting my time every week for no money and little feedback. It really just isn’t worth it anymore.

Fortunately, I saw a few good movies this week, and more than a few bad, so let’s start with one of the good ones, shall we?

This week’s “Featured Flick” is Lee Isaac Chung’s MINARI (A24), which like Nomadland last week will get some sort of virtual cinema release in New York and L.A., presumably that can be seen across the country. It will then get its official release on February 12, 2021.

The movie stars Steven Yeun from The Walking Dead as Jacob, a Korean father who brings his family to an Arkansas house in the middle of nowhere in the ‘80s, hoping to start a farm. His wife Monica (Yeri Han) is not happy with this decision but their kids Anne (Noel Cho) and David (Alan S. Kim) try to adjust to the new life. Things aren’t going well but then Monica’s mother Soonja (Yuh-jung Youn) shows up, that just adds more pressure on Jacob, and the kids, especially David, who hates the quirky older woman who acts nothing like a grandmother.

I’d been hearing about Minari going all the way back to its debut at Sundance, and though I remained skeptical, I finally saw it a few months ago an again over the weekend, and it’s one of my favorite films of the year, probably Top 5. To me, it’s somewhat in the vein of The Farewell, my number 1 movie of 2019, vs. the Oscar Best Picture winner, Parasite. It’s a very personal story for Chung who based some of the experiences on his own childhood, which once again proves the adage that if you’re going to write a movie, make it personal since that’s the most likely to connect with others. (Not always true, but it was great advice when I was given it.)

It takes a little time to understand why Minari is so beloved, since Chung takes an interesting approach where we see various scenes that don’t necessarily seem to tie into some sort of plot. Characters like Will Patton’s ultra-religious zealot who seems to be a bit lost when Jacob takes him on to help with his farm. Otherwise, we see various character interactions as things get tenser and tenser between Jacob and Monica, who are fighting all the time. Although the drama does get intense at times, there’s a lot of joyful and fun moments, particularly those involving the wacky grandmother and her dysfunctional relationship with her grandson. I also enjoyed the relationship between the two kids where Anne is always protective of her younger brother, who has some sort of heart illness. 

It's a beautiful movie with an equally gorgeous score, but it’s really in the last 20 minutes or so when we start to see where Chung has been going with all these seemingly disparate elements, which builds up to a wonderful ending. Yeun is terrific, and the fact he reminded me of my own father -- we’re neither Korean nor have I ever been to Arkansas -- shows why his subdued performance is so effective. Overall, the film proves that however many awful things life might throw at you, your family can always fix things. I love that message, and I hope others will find and love this as well.

After its one week in virtual cinema, Minari will get an expanded theatrical release starting February 12… hopefully, New York City theaters will be open by then and I can see it in a theater.

Film at Lincoln Center in New York also is starting its 49th annual “New Directors/New Films” series, which was delayed from March, although being virtual, the movies in it can also be viewed nationwide for the first time. I feel like a lot of movies that were scheduled to play ND/NF ended up being released already but there should be some interesting things in there.

George Clooney’s latest film THE MIDNIGHT SKY is based on Lily Brooks-Dalton’s novel Good Morning, Midnight, in which he plays Augustine, a scientist dying on his own at the Barbeau Observatory in the Arctic, who has to warn a group of astronauts returning to earth that it’s no longer safe for them to return.

Clooney has made a lot of good and great movies over the years, so that I’m one of those people anxiously ≠waiting for him to make something great again after the disappointment of Suburbicon. Midnight Sky is definitely one step forward and a few steps back, as it’s impossible not to think of previous Clooney movies like Solaris and Gravity, as well as The Martian and Passengers and Ad Astra. Yes, we somehow have gotten to the point where every year there’s some sort of space movie, and while Midnight Sky at its best is better than Solaris or Ad Astra (sorry, but I was not a fan), there’s enough that’s so quizzical and confounding I’m not sure people will be able to follow what’s going on.

Much of the first half of the movie involves Clooney’s Augustine alone at the Artic base interacting with a little girl (Caoillin Springall) who is completely silent. If it’s ever explained what the girl represents, I must have missed it. There are also flashbacks to Augustine’s earlier career as a scientist and explorer played by a somewhat only semi-impressive Clooney kinda look-alike in Ethan Peck.

The best moments of the movie involve the crew of astronauts on the spaceship Ether, including Felicity Jones and David Oyelowo, who are in a relationship, Demián Bichir, Kyle Chandler and Tiffany Boone, as they deal with various issues. This is really where comparisons to Gravity and The Martian are earned, but that’s such a mighty quintet of actors that these sections are far more interesting than sullen bearded Clooney with his young ward. The production design and visual FX in these portions of the film are also quite impressive.

The Midnight Sky throws a lot at the viewer but then tries too hard to be quizzical and enigmatic about how all of it ties together until the very end. I feel that some of Clooney’s more mainstream fans will be quite confounded and possibly even disappointed. The Midnight Sky is Clooney taking a swing and only partially connecting, and it might require multiple viewings to feel like it’s a worthy addition to his filmography.

Either way, The Midnight Sky will open theatrically in select cities this week and then be on Netflix on December 23, just in time for depressing everyone on Christmas!

Also hitting Netflix streaming this week is Ryan Murphy’s musical THE PROM, which I reviewed last week. It’s great, I loved it, and can’t wait to watch it again!

Next up is Clooney’s pal Steven Soderbergh, whose new movie LET THEM ALL TALK, will premiere on HBO Max this Thursday, December 10. It stars Meryl Streep as renowned writer Alice who is called to England to receive a prestigious literary award. Since she doesn’t fly, she’s booked on a cross-Atlantic trip on the Queen Mary II ship. Alice decides to bring her old friend Roberta (Candice Bergen)—whom hasn’t spoken to her in three decades--and Susan (Dianne Wiest) as well as her nephew Tyler (Lucas Hedges) to serve as her assistant so she can focus on her writing. Little does she know that her young agent Karen (Gemma Chan) is also on the ship hoping to find out what Alice is writing about with the help of Tyler, who is quite smitten with her.  

I’m not sure where to begin with one of week’s films that I probably had the highest expectations and ended up leaving me with the most utter disappointment. I wasn’t really that crazy about last year’s The Laundromat, and I’ve generally found Soderbergh’s work to be hit or miss over the last few years. I loved his thriller Unsanefor instance, and the Magic Mike movies were fun. This one, written by author Deborah Eisenberg, is just plain boring for most of it, offering nothing particularly interesting or insightful, as it’s basically another movie where Streep is playing a character who moans about how difficult her life is and how much better everyone else has it. I mean, if I wanted that shit, I’d spend more time on Twitter than I already do. And then there’s Hedges, one of my favorite young actors over the past few years, who seems to have fallen into a niche playing

In fact, my favorite aspect of the film was Gemma Chan, who plays a character with far more depth and dimension than normal, although much of her role is just to spy on Alice and fend of the subtle advances by the much younger Tyler. The two actors have some fun scenes together, far more lively than anything involving the older actresses, but you always know where it’s going. It’s kind of awkward and painful to watch Hedges bomb so hard. (At least he fared better playing a similar role in French Exit, but in that one, his love interest was Danielle Macdonald.)

The movie looks good with Soderbergh handling his own camera duties and cinematography as usual, and it’s scored with the same hipster jazz he might have used in one of his Ocean movies, but the movie just goes on and on and on, and it hs one of the most “what the fuck?” moments you’ll see this year.

If you can imagine one of The Trip movies without any of the laughs or the delicious food porn…but on a ship, that’s basically what you end up with. More than once while watching Soderbergh’s movie, I was ready to abandon ship.

And from pretty bad, we go to much, MUCH worse. Do you know what thyme it is? It’s WILD MOUNTAIN THYME!!!

John Patrick Shanley adapts his own play Outside Mullingar into a film that will be released in theaters and On Demand by Bleeker Street this Friday, and believe me, its biggest problems isn’t some of the awful Irish accents on display, but they certainly don’t help. Emily Blunt plays Rosemary and Jamie Dornan is Anthony, childhood friends who live down the street from each other in their Irish farming community. When they grow up, Rosemary’s father dies leaving her with a plot of land that forces Anthony and his father Tony (Christopher Walken) to have to use a gate to get to their home. Remember this gate, because it’s going to be mentioned so much over the course of the movie, you’ll wonder why the movie wasn’t called “Wild Mountain Gate.” (It’s actually named after a song that Blunt’s character sings for no apparent reason.)

First, you’ll have to get past the odd choice of the very non-Irish Walken in a key role as the dead narrator of the story with that aforementioned horrid accent. It won’t take long for you to start scratching your head how a noted playwright like Shanley could write such a horrible screenplay. Soon after, you’ll wonder how he convinced someone to finance making it into a movie. I’m normally a pretty big fan of Blunt, but this movie and role might be one of her biggest missteps as an actor to date. As a child, Rosemary was told by her father that she was the White Swan in Swan Lake, so of course that will lead to

It’s not long before Jon Hamm shows up as one of Anthony’s distant relatives who also has interest in Rosemary’s plot of land – nudge, nudge, wink, wink. Pretty soon we’re thrust into awkward love triangle rom-com that falls somewhere between Leap Year and The Holiday. Not exactly something you’d expect from the filmmaker behind the drama Doubt that produced multiple Oscar nominations for the cast, eh?

Instead, Shanley ends up trying to foist the… I don’t want to call it chemistry. What is the exact opposite of chemistry? Between Blunt and Dorman with one long boring conversation after another. At one point, they’re having a romantic chat about suicide, the next Anthony is telling Rosemary that he thinks he’s a honeybee. I mean, what the holy fuck?

Honestly, the whole thing is just grueling to watch, because you wonder how so much talent could falter so badly, particularly Shanley? Even the recent Shane MacGowan doc was a far more romantic take on Irish farming than this could ever possibly be.

One of the nicer surprises of the week is the sci-fi thriller PARALLEL (Vertical), which will be in theaters and On Demand this Friday, and it’s likely to be missed by a lot of people who would enjoy it. Directed by Isaac Ezban from a screenplay by Scott Blaszak, it follows four young people working in the tech sector of Seattle who discover a mirror in a hidden section of the house they’re renting that apparently allows them to experience other dimensions and other versions of their lives. Soon, they’re experimenting with different ways they can make money and achieve fame, although not all of them are cool about how they’re doing it.

Although Parallel opens like a home invasion thriller featuring the great Kathleen Quinlan, we soon learn that it’s a red herring before we meet the quartet of young entepreneurs working on a parking app with an almost impossible deadline. When they find the mirror that leads into an alternative dimension, they immediately start to experiment with figuring out what is happening exactly, and once they do, they realize they can make money by stealing from “alts” i.e. other versions of themselves. Soon, their success starts driving them insane with a desire for even more money and power.

Ezban’s movie benefits from a talented mostly unknown cast, including Martin Wallstrom and Mark O’Brien as boisterous alpha males. Georgia King’s artist Leena is far more than a love interest, although she does become an obsession for one of them eventually – and man, does she remind me of a young Reese Witherspoon. British actor Aml Ameen plays Devin, whose father committed suicide after being accused of corruption, and he’s also wary of some of the activities his friends get up to. There’s also the quartet’s main competitor Seth who gets suspicious of their success as they start producing all sorts of incredible technical inventions.

Parallel is a pretty twisted sci-fi movie that in some way reminded me of the ‘90s thriller Flatliners and even Primer a little bit, but the mirror aspect to it also will draw comparisons to Oculus, one of Mike Flanagan’s cool earlier movies. It doesn’t take long for the twists to start flying at the viewer, and once they do, your mind will be boggled and not necessarily in a bad way. I wouldn’t want to even begin sharing some of the crazy places where the film goes, but even gore fans won’t be disappointed by some of it.

It’s a real shame this terrific movie has floundered without distribution or deserved attention for so long, because there’s absolutely no question in my mind that Jason Blum should be talking to Ezban and Blaszk about doing something together. Parallel is the type of quality high-concept thriller Blumhouse thrives upon.

Another nice surprise this week was Ekwa Msangi’s FAREWELL AMOR (IFC Films), which debuted at Sundance earlier this year and barely got any attention, which is a real shame. It’s expanded from her earlier short, and it’s about an Angolan immigrant named Walter (Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine), who is reunited with his wife Esther (Zainab Jah) and daughter Sylvia (Jayme Lawson) after 17 years. As they share a small New York apartment, Walter and Esther try to rekindle their romance while Sylvia tries to adjust to an American school.

Msangi’s film opens at Newark airport where the small family is reunited, Walter not having seen either wife or daughter in a decade and a half. He’s working as a cab driver, and he’s ready to rekindle the old flame and meet his daughter who was only a baby when he moved to the States. (Little does Esther know that Walter was in a relationship with another woman, a nurse who isn’t too happy about having to leave Walter’s life.)

One of the things Msangi does to keep things interesting is that she splits the film into three sections, one for each character that focuses specifically on them, and the story gets infinitely interesting as we learn more about each of them. Walter is somewhat at odds with doing the right thing by his wife and daughter, who is wanting to explore her love of dance that her ultra-religious mother forebids. For some reason, I thought Sylvia’s section would be the most interesting as she deals with the trials of being a teenager, but then Esther’s section shows her to be a far more layered character we might have assumed earlier. She also befriends a neighbor woman played by Joie Lee that helps her expand. The thing is that all three are clearly good people, and you never feel as if one is doing something bad in relation to the others.

Farewell Amor is a quiet but beautiful film that explores an immigrant story in a far different way than we’ve seen before. It’s a discovery film, and I hope people will not just presume it won’t hold their interest. It’s a wonderfully relatable human story, similar to Tom McCarthy’s The Visitor.

Sienna Miller and Diego Luna star in Tara Miele’s psychological drama WANDER DARKLY (Lionsgate), playing Adrienne and Matteo, a couple who recently had a baby. After they get into a horrible car accident while arguing, they end up revisiting the highs and lows of their relationship as Adrienne believes either she or Matteo or both are dead.

This is a surprisingly stranger film than I expected, delving into the supernatural not quite in the way as something like Wes Craven’s Serpent and the Rainbow or Jacob’s Ladder, but having a few elements in common. Although I haven’t seen Miele’s other films, this one feels very much like something Drake Doremus might have made to the point where I’m not sure I could say I fully understood what was happening from one moment to the next. The film seems to be exploring a couple’s relationship through a horrible tragedy but does in a strange way.

With the emotional performances by the two leads being enhanced by an amazing score by Alex Weston (who also scored The Farewell last year), Wander Darkly is more than anything, a performance piece with a decent script and further proof Miller continues to be one of the most underrated actresses working today. Despite those great performances, the movie’s strange premise might be too metaphysical and intense in execution for everyone to be along for the entire ride. In that sense, I probably liked last week’s Black Bear just slightly more.

I reviewed Steve McQueen’s ALEX WHEATLE (Amazon Prime Video) in last week’s column, and that will hit Amazon Prime this Friday, but I think I’m going to save Education, the last film in his “Small Axe Anthology” for next week’s column.  I was also hoping to review Tom Moore and Ross Stewart’s WOLFWALKERS (Apple+) this week, since it premieres on Apple TV+ on Friday, but I just couldn’t get to it. Story of my life.

I’m not sure if I could tell you how many of the Ip Man movies I’ve seen over the past 12 or so years, many of which I saw at the New York Asian Film Festival, but Ip Man is indeed back after last year’s Ip Man: The Finale, but that’s because IP MAN: KUNG FU MASTER (Magnet/Magnolia Pictures) is part of the spin-off prologue series starring Dennis (Yu-Hang) To, who looked enough like a younger Donnie Yen to start a whole sub-franchise. This one is directed by Liming Li, who is also directing a Young Ip Man: Crisis Time prequel movie that presumably stars someone younger than both Yen and To. Got it?

Okay, maybe this needs a little more explaining, although the nice thing about Kung Fu Master is that it works perfectly fine as a stand-alone in case you’ve never seen any of the other movies. This one takes place in the ‘40s as Man is a police captain in Foshan, dealing with the ever-present gang known as The Axes.  He’s framed for murder when the leader of the gang dies in prison, and his daughter, Miss Qingchuan (Wanliruo Xin), wanting revenge as she takes over the gang. Ip Man has other issues like being disgraced as a police officer and then the arrival of the Japanese army who have their own agenda. Ip Man ends up donning a mask to become the Black Knight to fight crime in another way.

I make no bones about my love of martial arts films when they’re not stupid or hoaky and sadly, the Donnie Yen franchise was getting by last year’s so-called “finale.” Kung Fu Master starts out with an amazing action scene of To fighting off what seems like hundred of axe-wielding gangsters, and it barely lets up, constantly throwing interesting and thoroughly entertaining fights at the viewer. Eventually, there’s a bounty on Ip Man’s head with whoever kills becoming leader of the Axes, but he has other issues, like his wife giving birth to their baby boy, just as the police chief and force shows up to arrest him. Cutting quickly between childbirth and kung fu action is just one of the interesting things Director Li does to make his Ip Man debut.

The resemblance between Dennis To and Donnie Yen is more than just facial as his wushu techniques are equally impressive, and sure, there’s a few more dramatic moments between Ip Man and his wife, but it’s Xin’s Miss Qingchuan who ends up being more of a formidable counter to To in just about every way, including a few fight scenes where axes are flying through the air.

Ip Man Kung Fu Master is fairly short, less than 90 minutes, but it still feels long because it feels like it finds a good ending, and then tacks on an epilogue and then another one. There were times I thought it might end on a cliffhanger to set up Ip Man’s inevitable next movie. The abundance of evil antagonists Ip Man must fight in this one tends to become a bit much, but it’s hard not to be thrilled by the martial arts on display and Li’s terrifically stylish visuals that keeps the movie interesting.

Ip Man Kung Fu Master will be available digitally Friday through a variety of platforms.

Filmmaker Adam Egypt Mortimer, who released Daniel Isn’t Real last year, returns with ARCHENEMY (RLJEfilms), starring Joe Manganiello as Max Fist, who claims to be a hero from another dimension that fell to earth. He ends up spending time with a teen brother and sister, Hamster (Skylan Brooks) and Indigo (Zelee Griggs) who want to clean the streets of the local drug syndicate, led by The Manager (Glenn Howerton from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia). It’s a strange and quirky dark superhero movie that includes appearances by the likes of Paul Scheer and Amy Seimetz, and though I ran out of time to review, I do have an interview with Mortimer at Below the Line.

Time to get to some docs, and there are definitely some you’ll want to check out, although I don’t have as much time to write that much about them, and some of them I wasn’t able to watch yet.

Another great doc out of the September festival circuit is Ryan White’s ASSASSINS (Greenwich Entertainment), which follows the assassination of Kim Jong-nam, half-brother to North Korean leader Kim Jon-un in 2017 at a busy airport in Malaysia by two young women. Although the two women had never met before, they were jointly charged with attacking the North Korean ex-pat with a lethal nerve gas called VX but White’s investigation takes him all over South-East Asia trying to get answers to how the two women were tricked into committing the assassination. This is a pretty masterful display of doc filmmaking by White, not just in the sense of the way the story is paced and edited like a good political thriller, but it’s one that keeps the viewer invested even as the last act deals with the trial of the two young women and the bond that forms between them.

I’ll have more about this film over on Below the Line sometime very soon, but it hits theaters and virtual cinema this Friday and then it will be on PVOD on January 15

I saw Seamus Murphy’s doc PJ HARVEY: A DOG CALLED MONEY way back in March when it was supposed to open at New York’s Film Forum, but it’s finally getting a virtual cinema release there. Murphy travelled across Afghanistan, Kosovo and Washington DC with singer/songwriter PJ Harvey as she prepared material for her 2015 album, The Hope Six Million Project, which she produced with Flood and John Parish as an installation at Somerset House where people can walk by and view the recording process.  This is an amazing doc that allows you into the process of writing for an amazing recording artist who has given Murphy and the viewer unprecedented access into her creativity. I had fully lost track of Harvey over the years, even though I was a huge fan of hers when she first hit these shores – in fact, I saw her play a concert where Radiohead opened for her… and there as another band (Gallon Drunk) after them! Because of that, I wasn’t familiar with the album, but I just love good music docs, especially ones that take us behind the scenes of a talented artist, and Murphy has created quite a fascinating film even outside the recording studio, whether it’s following Harvey around (narrated by her own poetic observations) but also with commentary by others they encounter. I found the Washington DC segments particularly interesting, since that’s the one place where I’ve spent the most time.  An absolutely fantastic doc whether you’re a fan of Harvey’s or not.

Also playing in the Film Forum’s Virtual Cinema this week is Thomas Balmés’ SING ME A SONG, the filmmaker’s second doc set in the Himalayan village of Bhutan that’s been isolated for centuries. He returns to update on Peyangki, the 8-year-old Buddhist monk from his 2014 film Happiness, now a teenager who has fallen under the sway of technology including pop music and smartphone games, as he begins a WeChat romance with a young singer, which makes him consider leaving the monastery.

Also premiering on Netflix this Friday is Jim Stern and Fernando Villena’s doc GIVING VOICE, tying into the streaming premiere of August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom next week. It follows six student actors auditioning for the August Wilson Monologue Competition, which brings thousands of students from twelve U.S. cities together to perform the Pulitzer Prize winner’s work.

Joshua Faudem’s doc THE LAST SERMON (Gravitas Ventures/Will Kennan) follows the director and Jack Baxter as they follow 14 years after making their 2004 documentary Blues by the Beach, in which the two ended up in a terrorist attack by British Nationals on Mike’s Place, a bar next door to the National Embassy on Tel Aviv. This event sends Baxter and Faudem across Europe to refugee camps and mosques in order to understand the essence of Islam and the truth about the international terrorists that almost killed them.

Drew Barrymore plays a dual role in THE STAND-IN (Saban Films), directed by Jamie Babbitt (But I’m a Cheerleader). While under normal circumstances, Wild Mountain Thyme would have been the dog of the week, then this movie came along. Yikes. Barrymore plays Candy Black, a comedy star best known for her pratfalls in bad movies (ala Melissa McCarthy). She also plays Paula, Candy’s much sweeter and almost identical stand-in. Candy is a nightmare to work with and after a fall from grace, she holes herself up in her Long Island Estate for five years, while Paula’s own fortunes falter without having that work. I’m sure you can figure out where it goes from there.

Yes, folks, we have what is now one of the worst iterations of a Tale of Two Cities not made by Barrymore’s frequent co-star Adam Sandler, although there are times where you wonder if she is actually playing a version of Sandler with Candy. Eventually, either Candy or Paula or both decide that Paula can take Candy’s place in her attempt to return to work, but the results are just far worse than The Hottie or the Nottie, as Paula also stands in for Candy on dates with the man she’s fallen in love with online through their love of woodworking. (I didn’t make that up.) You almost always know where it’s going and can’t help but groan when you’re right.

Basically, there’s one Drew that’s glammed-down and the other talking in an annoying wispy voice, so there really isn’t getting away from the awfulness even for a second.The thing is that, like the worst comedies, The Stand In is not funny, and it’s sad to see a decent director like Babbitt being dragged into this one. It’s just a terrible overused premise that’s executed quite poorly. Not only that, but the movie also co-stars TJ Miller, who has fallen so far from grace himself, that it’s shocking to see him in another movie.

Besides guaranteeing Barrymore a double-dose Razzie nomination, The Stand In also leaves her with cow shit on her face, much like her character.

Movies I just didn’t have time to get to this week:

Funny Boy (Array/Netflix) Gunda (NEON) Safety (Disney+) Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart (HBO Max) 40 Years a Prisoner (HBO Docs) Through the Night (Longshot Factory) To the Ends of the Earth (KimStim) Rompan Todo: The History of Rock in Latin America (Netflix) The Wilds (Prime Video) Nasrin (Virgil Films) Finding Ying Yin

By the way, if you read this week’s column and have bothered to read this far down, feel free to drop me some thoughts at Edward dot Douglas at Gmail dot Com or drop me a note or tweet on Twitter. I love hearing from readers … honest!

[calzona-ga]

"I can't believe that this little show that we wrote and thought was a lot of fun in the beginning has turned out to be this thing that has really taught people," creator Rhimes says of her medical drama, which brought Meredith and McDreamy to life (and "vajayjay" into the vernacular), as she and partner Betsy Beers reveal their favorites and frustrations over 14 seasons.

When Grey's Anatomy premiered in March 2005, Shonda Rhimes was a newbie writer, Netflix was a DVD-by-mail delivery service and ABC was in the midst of a reinvention with Desperate Housewives and Lost. Now, 14 seasons later, Rhimes, 47, has built an empire that includes an estimated $100 million deal to create originals for Netflix and a full night of programming — ABC's Thank God It's Thursday — with a second Grey's spinoff (the first, Private Practice, lasted six seasons) coming in 2018. "Shonda and the team have done a fantastic job of keeping the storylines and the characters fresh by replenishing the cast over the years," says ABC Studios president Patrick Moran. The pop culture juggernaut and worldwide phenomenon (it airs in 220 territories) is ABC's No. 2 drama (behind only freshman breakout The Good Doctor), with 11.7 million total viewers and a 3.2 rating among adults 18-to-49 — not too shabby for a show about to see its 300th episode (airing Nov. 9). "Mothers who were pregnant during season one are now watching the show with their daughters," says ABC Entertainment president Channing Dungey of the new audiences discovering Grey's on Netflix. To celebrate their milestone, Rhimes and longtime producing partner Betsy Beers, 59, spoke with THR in their cozy Shondaland offices at Sunset Gower Studios about how far the show has come, the road ahead, characters they'd like to revive (literally) and — why not? — shoes.

If you could go back in time knowing what you know now, what would you each do differently? RHIMES I probably would have had better contracts to start with. The show has made $2 billion or so, and these are not $2 billion shoes. BEERS If we had known this was going to happen, we might have been more aggressive initially in our approach. RHIMES We'd both be laying on a beach in Zanzibar somewhere. No, we'd probably still be working, that's the problem. Every choice we've made, it's why the show works the way it does. Every time the interns were learning, we were learning. BEERS We've both grown up; Shonda has written books about her changes. We really matured into our jobs. RHIMES And have become more confident.

Several actors have come and gone over the years, from Patrick Dempsey to Sara Ramirez. If you could bring someone back, who would you want to have another chance to write for? RHIMES I'm always going to say Sandra Oh [Cristina] because for me, she's the most fun to write for. But if Kyle Chandler [who guest-starred as a bomb squad leader] showed up unexploded, I'd enjoy writing for him. BEERS Denny [a patient who died, played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan].

You get a lot of feedback from fans about how medical storylines have helped them diagnose themselves or a family member. What stands out? RHIMES What is significant is how many there are. I can't believe that this little show that we wrote and thought was a lot of fun in the beginning has turned out to be this thing that has really taught people. And the number of people who have gone to medical school because they want to be like those doctors is also incredible. BEERS Somebody we knew realized they had breast cancer from watching LaTanya Richardson's storyline [as a woman with breast cancer]. The one that sticks out to me was, many years ago a kid in Canada saved his parent by doing CPR because he'd seen it on Grey's.

What's the most interesting note you've received from Standards and Practices over the years? RHIMES Over the course of this many seasons, what you start to understand is that it's not necessarily about what has happened before; it's about what the climate is politically, because things roll forward and roll back and roll forward again, and that's always surprising. As often as we said "vagina" on the show, to suddenly be told, "I don't know if you can say 'vagina' this time" is hilarious, but also frustrating.

Is that where the term "vajayjay" came from? RHIMES Years ago, yes. I used that because it was Bailey [Chandra Wilson] in a personal situation. My standard is always: These are medical people trained to be doctors; they are not going to use some weird name for body parts. It's terrible to teach women that they should use weird names for their body parts. But it was funny and worked in that moment.

Grey's was poised to tackle abortion in season two with Oh's character, who wound up having an ectopic pregnancy instead. Was that network pushback? RHIMES I had been planning for Cristina to have an abortion, and nobody said we couldn't do it. They were like, "It just is not done very often and it sometimes causes a lot of controversy." We hadn't been on the air long, and I wasn't brave enough to just say, "Screw it, we're doing it." I held back. I remember Sandra being like, "Come on!" Years later when we did it [with Oh in season eight], I got more pushback about that than I did when we were going to do it the first time.

Do you regret not going through with that in season two? RHIMES No. We didn't know the characters well enough. What I have come to understand and love about our show is, the more you get to know those characters, the more powerful things are. When Cristina chose to have the abortion, she had a perfectly good guy beside her, a great career and she is a person who was very clear about the fact that she did not want to have children. There is something wrong with our society in that it does not support a woman's choice to not want to have children. On TV, that is never portrayed as: You're watching a woman whom you respect make a choice that feels like a really strong, powerful choice that a lot of women make, and we pretend that nobody does. BEERS And that's an incredibly liberating moment.

Would you ever take on a timely issue, like the debate over universal health care? RHIMES We've done the "people who have no insurance and we're going to give them the surgery anyway" stories. I don't know what the universal health care story would be yet, so it would be about figuring out what that is. I don't ever approach anything from the issue first, so I can't tell you that I've thought about tackling universal health care. I'd have to have some great story I'd want to tell, and then universal health care would become part of the way to tell that story. BEERS Issues have emerged from the stories and the characters and the storylines. RHIMES It's the only way to tell stories.

What's the casting or pilot story that still stands out? RHIMES Isaiah Washington came in for the role of Derek Shepherd, and Patrick Dempsey was there. And then we had Sandra come in for the role of Bailey. I looked at her and thought she could be Cristina, and everyone was like, "What?! That's totally different from what we thought she was going to be like." Chandra Wilson came in, and she was not the Bailey we imagined, but the best Bailey ever. Jim Pickens was the only person who ever read for the Chief. There were a million guys who came in for George, but we just fell in love with T.R. Knight. Picking the actors was simple. BEERS In comparison to the way it is to cast a pilot now, where there are 4 billion TV shows and you're slaughtering people in the road to try to get to somebody … this was, in retrospect, a cakewalk.

How much input does Ellen Pompeo (Meredith Grey) have on the show? RHIMES Her opinion is very important. I have said to her that we're in this together, and that's important because it doesn't feel right that she be some sort of soldier on a field just taking orders. She also has some really beautiful, smart insights and some amazing character choices. When the character was steeped in grief [after the death of her husband Derek, played by Dempsey], we had some amazing conversations about what that would mean and where the character would go and how she would handle it.

Does Grey's Anatomy exist without Ellen? RHIMES Not as far as I'm concerned.

Have there been any talks about how much longer Ellen is interested in doing the show? RHIMES No comment.

As you've gone from intern to chief, what's your biggest change? RHIMES It's about having gone from being two kids in a candy store to being leaders. A lot of people think that they are leaders just because they have been placed in charge of something — and you're not. BEERS The learning process is sort of a baptism by fire, too, because you learn on the way. I hopefully have an easier time figuring out what's really a problem because everything seems to be the same when you start. The great thing about getting to be on a show this long and becoming a leader through it is it helps you prioritize, and that knowledge helps you enjoy the job a lot more. RHIMES You're less afraid to make decisions. It's easier to look at the landscape and pick out the mistakes. Before, everything looked the same and so you were terrified that you were going to step on a land mine before you knew it. I was always terrified that if I stopped working, none of this would work. I only started to think that maybe this would actually last in season seven or eight. You start to enjoy yourself and get comfortable and you're not afraid to make decisions, and if the decision is a bad one, then you're not afraid to take the heat.

Looking ahead, you're launching a firefighter spinoff come midseason on ABC as the flagship's second offshoot. Have you considered others over time? RHIMES We think about it a lot. There's always different spinoff ideas that come up all the time. It's too easy almost. BEERS If something is really interesting then immediately maybe that could be a spinoff.

Do you have a title yet for the firefighter spinoff? RHIMES I like to tell people that it's called Fire Place and say it really seriously and see their faces, because that's the worst title ever! BEERS The Fire Place. (Laughter.) We were saying that on set, and every 10 minutes it was just a different one: "Tonight on Feel the Burn!" (Laughter.)

What are some of the ideas you've discussed in the past? What made firefighters the right idea? RHIMES I'm not going to tell you because maybe one day we'll make them. The firefighter spinoff was interesting because that was an idea that wasn't an idea. The idea that we were going to put Jason George [who plays Dr. Ben Warren on the flagship] in it was not part of the idea. In a weird way, we kind of wrote the [season 13] finale as a firefighter thing — BEERS — without knowing that we were doing it … RHIMES … because we weren't doing a firefighter spinoff. We talked about firefighters being really cool and everybody was obsessed with them, so we were like, "Let's do a big, giant fire!" But it wasn't anything until after, when we were like, "We really have to have a spinoff topic." Then [Grey's writer-EP] Stacy McKee pitched this beautiful thing. BEERS It was super organic. We just reverse engineered something that was already there.

Is the larger goal to build a world similar to what Dick Wolf has done with NBC's Chicago franchise, where all the shows are connected? BEERS The primary determinant continues to be if we really want to watch it and we really want to see it and we really want to work on it, then we do it. RHIMES Because that ends up being what's good. I'm flummoxed by Dick Wolf. While I'll watch Law & Order until the cows come home, when [Grey's] was first on the air, it would never occur to me to go, "Let's franchise this; let's make Grey's Anatomy: Chicago," or whatever those people do. BEERS Very early on, somebody had said we should do that. RHIMES We didn't even know what that meant. It was like, "So there's just another Meredith?" BEERS Should we call her Meredith? She's in another city; she'd be called Meredith Flay? (Laughter.) RHIMES Flay's Anatomy?! That's super weird. So no, I don't think that's ever occurred to us in that way. BEERS We're excited about this because I want to see something that is fun to do, to work in a different space that we've never been in before. We have a stage that you burn stuff on. It's insane. RHIMES It pretty much goes with [the thinking of], wouldn't it be really cool to have an Oval Office? Wouldn't it be cool to have an OR?

Krista Vernoff returned as co-showrunner this season. Why is it important to bring her back? RHIMES The only way I was going to be able to allow myself to step back a bit was to have somebody there whom I knew had this. Krista understands my sense of humor, and she can write. She is just as passionate about the show now as she was in year one. I needed somebody that I knew would care that much, and that is not an easy thing to find, especially when you're saying, "I'm going to hand off my baby to somebody to look after." I have never been able to hand it off before, so I wouldn't be able to hand it off if I didn't have somebody who was going to do a really great job.

Ben Sherwood recently said 2 million people per month watch the Grey's pilot on Netflix. How has new viewers finding the show helped Grey's sustain itself over the years? RHIMES The beauty of Netflix is it continues to make new audiences for us. Our fans can give birth to our fans. Grey's has this universal, global thing to it. It works all over the world. BEERS There is a timeless quality to the show. The stories are emotional, the medicine is always relevant. Nothing is outdated because it's all based in real emotions and caring about people.

How will the Netflix deal impact your involvement with Grey's and the spinoff going forward? RHIMES Pretty much be exactly what it is now since we are in the middle of the Netflix deal right now.

You wrote in your welcome essay on Shondaland.com, your media site, about "too much change" and ending Scandal when you wanted to. Have there been times when you've wanted to end Grey's? RHIMES Yes. Season two, season three, season four, season five … it was an exhausting show until I really got the hang of doing 22 to 24 episodes a season. I learned how to write TV by writing Grey's Anatomy. It was about getting the hang of being a leader, being a boss and then doing two shows at a time [with Private Practice], and then three shows at a time [with Scandal]. But it was more about, "Can I do this?" That's how I discovered the art of reinvention: I'd write a season ending and be like, "That's it, we're done." And then I'd have to come up with something else. That got really fun.

All three shows that you've created (Grey's, Private Practice and Scandal) have run for more than 100 episodes — you're the first female showrunner to accomplish that feat. Given the challenges with cutting through in an era of 500 shows, do you think there will be other showrunners with three 100-episode shows to come? RHIMES I have no idea. Honestly, you can look at network television and say that you can't quite tell what's coming. But I hope so.

Do you have an ultimate goal of what the end of Grey's Anatomy is? Is that something you think about? RHIMES No, not anymore. When we realized that Netflix was reinfusing the show with a whole new audience and that it didn't seem to be going anywhere — and the ratings were going up and not down — that's when I had to get really Zen with myself and say, "What do we want? How do I feel about this?" It's been maddening and amazing to discover that you can reinvent it every year and it still works. I heard [Disney-ABC Television Group president] Ben Sherwood said something about [Grey's running for 40 years like] General Hospital. That's not the plan. But the idea that we are going to go until it feels like we're done is great.

Will that decision ultimately be yours to make? RHIMES Yes. I don't know why the end of Grey's wouldn't be my decision. Who would close the chocolate factory but me?

[theamazingstories]

Three gears are lined up against a starlit background. The gear on the left bears the word “fact”; the gear on the right, “theory”. Attached to the central gear is an implement half test-tube and half fountain pen, which writes a single word on the yellow surface below: “Scientifiction”. It was September 1928, and Amazing Stories had found its symbol.

In his editorial “Our Amazing Universe”, Hugo Gernsback takes aim at scientists who dismiss the idea of human-like lifeforms existing on other planets; as a rebuttal he points out, not entirely convincingly, that other stars and planets are made from the same elements as our sun. He then moves on to discuss how the vast distances in space would affect communication:

If we assume the existence of intelligent beings on Alpha Centauri; and if we had a radio transmitter and receiver and if the people on Alpha Centauri had the same equipment that could bridge this space, we would have the following strange experience:

We would call up a friend in Alpha Centauri on January 1, 1928, and the message traveling by radio—which has the same speed as light, i.e., 186,000 miles a second—would take four years and three-tenths to get to Alpha Centauri. It would, therefore, arrive sometime early in 1932. The friend would promptly answer over his radio telephone!, and his answer would be received by us sometime in 1936. And remember, this is our nearest star-neighbor in space. It is only a little over four short light-years away. The overwhelming greater portion of stars are thousands, hundreds of thousands, and millions of light-years away from us.

Yet all of this is merely a trivial distance as far as the visible universe is concerned — and as Gernsback reminds us, “the entire visible universe most likely is a very small speck of matter after all. He ties all of this to that favourite topic of his, the issue of believability in science fiction:

If we could imagine for a second that there is no such thing as our universe, and then read an account of a number of important facts about it, written like a story by a clever scientifiction writer, perhaps, instead of by an astronomer, we would probably greet the volume with jeers and disbelief.

The issue’s cover, meanwhile, is the winning entry for the April issue’s $300 contest to design a symbol for scientifiction. “There was a time when a Scientifiction book or novel was a scarcity”, runs the contest announcement. “Now, with Amazing Stories Monthly and Amazing Stories Quarterly championing the cause, Scientifiction has excited the attention of hundreds of thousands of people who never knew what the term meant before. More than that, it is a distinct departure from the sex-infested novels and books that are so prevalent today.” The rise of interest in the genre, so the magazine’s reasoning goes, meant that a symbol was needed.

The winning entry was that of Mr. A. A. Kaufman of Brooklyn, who came up with the idea of a gear to represent science alongside a pen to represent fiction. The contest organisers melded Kaufman’s design with the ideas pitched by the first two runners-up, Clarence Beck and A. J. Jacobson, to create the more complex image seen on the cover:

In substance, Mr. Kaufman’s prize-winning design is preserved in the strictest sense, except for a few additions. It was our aim to incorporate as much science as possible in the design, so the frame of the design, representing structural steel, suggests more machinery. The flashes in the central wheel represent Electricity. The top of the fountain pen is a test tube, which stands for Chemistry; while the background with the moon and stars and planet, give us the science of Astronomy. We believe you will agree with us, that this makes an ideal trade-mark for Scientifiction, and we also admit that we are happy to have had solved for us a difficult problem.

The magazine printed the entries of the winner, runners-up and honourable mentions:

  The final design would begin appearing on the cover in smaller form with the November 1928 issue, before disappearing with the April 1928 instalment (Hugo Gernsback’s final issue). Whether science fiction ever really needed a logo is debatable; and Amazing‘s complex design, although no less intricate than some of the other logos from the era (consider Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer, for one) was never to have stood the test of time. Ironically, the Gernsback-Paul eye cover from earlier in the year has achieved a more lasting iconic status – being used on reprint volumes and the like – despite being intended only as a rough idea to inspire readers’ entries.

With the symbols covered, let us turn to the stories being symbolised…

“The Ambassador from Mars” by Harl Vincent

Frank Chandler is leading a successful career as an architect, but is tired of his demanding clients. While relaxing one day he is caught in a seeming explosion, and wakes up to find himself in a strange room. There, he encounters “a huge figure of a man, stripped to the waist, and with skin that glistened with the color of burnished brass” who “had the dignity of poise and the features of a Greek god”. This man introduces himself as Ky-lin, and explains that he and his people kidnapped Frank to save him from a breakdown.

Frank is also reunited with an old friend, Jack Conway, who reveals that Ky-lin and the other giants are an alien race called the Neloia, and that the two earthmen are currently on a vessel headed to the Neloia’s home world of Mars – or Uldar, as they refer to it. Jack has spent the last six years on Mars, and has grown to admire the Neloia, finding their civilisation superior to those of Earth (a planet known to the aliens as Visin):

They are a marvellous race; intellectually millions of years ahead of our most civilized races on earth; physically most beautiful, as you have observed in Ky-lin. Contrary to the popular superstition on Visin, they are most peaceful and kind. Of course there are other dwellers on the doomed planet, but these need hardly be considered as a race. We shall speak of them later.

It was Jack’s idea to abduct Frank, and while he was asleep, to give him a medical treatment that will condition him to life on Mars. Frank, having grown weary of Earth, has no objection to this plan.

The travellers arrive on Mars in time to see Ky-lin’s father, the Randenat (king) of the Neloia, die. This fits in with the general atmosphere, as Mars is a dying planet:

The landscape was seamed and scarred; bare; arid. Towering crags, of coppery hue, seemed about to crumble and fall. River beds and canals, long since dry, exposed strata of vari-colored rock—colors foreign to nature on earth. Not a sign of life or of vegetation was in evidence. Ruins of habitations which had once been pretentious in size and architectural beauty appeared here and there. Long unused roads, which had in past ages been smooth and heavily traveled, were now broken and twisted by the sub-surface convulsions of a planet in its death throes. Soon they approached the ruins of a large city, passed directly over it. This city had been walled, and still showed signs of a former high degree of organized civilization. Outlines of public squares, ruins of tall skyscrapers similar to those on earth, still remained. Some of the stone among the ruins gleamed with the myriad hues of mother-of-pearl. Over everything brooded the mystery of ages. The winds whipped up and sent into swirling clouds the dust of decay.

But not all of the threats faced by Ky-lin’s people are geological in origin The Neloia are menaced by a race of subterranean beings called the Breggia – the Morlocks to the Neloia’s Eloi:

He learned of the Breggia, the loathsome creatures who were the product of their underground environment, through ages of living near the sub-surface sea, where their ancestors, who had originally been Neloia, had fled in terror during an ancient period of quakes, landslides and other widespread surface disturbances which had, at one fell swoop, killed off half of the inhabitants of the planet. These creatures had degenerated through eons of time into amphibian monsters, retaining some of the features and brain capacity of the Neloia, but with bodies of reptiles and with eyes that could see only in darkness. Carnivorous they were, of necessity, feeding upon the fish and other creatures that abounded in the inner recesses of their realm. The Neloia feared them not in sunlight, but in darkness the raids of the Breggia were frequent and sometimes of serious consequence in the number of Neloia killed and in the destruction of considerable areas of the farm lands in the valley surrounding the city.

The Martians prepare Frank to serve as an ally, passing their scientific knowledge on to him using “mental impression laboratories”. Frank wants to help them fight the Breggia, and Jack looks on with admiration: “He had not spoken of this to Frank, but whenever memories came to him of the old days when his friend had led the Varsity eleven to victory time and again, stubbornly fighting against odds which would have discouraged anyone but Frank, he cheered up at once. Good old Chan, he thought, he seemed to be getting back to his old fighting form.” It is just as well that he is eager, as when Frank comes face to face with his first Breggia, he finds it a fearsome sight: “The creature was fully forty feet in length and its body reminded Frank of some of the antediluvian monsters he had seen in reconstructed skeleton form in the museum back in New York. This was a huge scaly lizard with a horrible and ferocious human head.”

The Breggia appear to be indestructible, but while exploring their caverns, Frank hits upon a discovery: he finds that the monsters can be poisoned with a particular weed. The Neloia go about weaponising this plant, and eventually succeed in routing the Breggia. However, they are still left with the issue of the planet itself dying.

Frank is sent back to Earth; landing on the same park bench from which he was taken in the first place, he wonders of his adventures on Mars were a dream, but then realises that he is carrying photographs of his time with the Neloia. He spends two years preparing to help the Neloia evacuate to Earth, and in the process is named Ambassador Extraordinary to the Martians. But it is too late: Mars explodes, and all Frank can do is watch from Earth as Ky-lin, Jack and his other friends on the red planet are killed.

However, the story’s narrator remarks that this may have been for the best, as it ensured that the Martians never saw “the terrible war of 1963 to 1966” as “the horrible slaughter and devastation wrought in that period would have caused a great deal more agony among them than did their sudden and quick destruction in their own homes.”

“The Ambassador from Mars” is a rather Burroughs-like tale, and one that demonstrates how a Burroughs-like tale really needs a Burroughs-like knack for romance and fantasy to work. Harl Vincent never really pulls it off, leaving his Mars a dull world populated by generic utopians and generic monsters. One of the story’s few surprising moments comes when Frank explores the cave of the Breggia and hears one of the monstrous beasts tending to its dying child, a moment that serves to humanise what were previously just mindless beasts:

Two voices were all that he heard, and when he caught the drift of the conversation, he thrilled with excitement. Evidently one voice was that of a mother Breggia and she was wailing her grief and berating a dying son for his carelessness. The son gasped excuses and apologies and was obviously suffering intensely.

However, the main purpose of this scene is simply as a means for Frank to learn about the poisonous weed and its effects on the Breggia, and any depth that it lends the story is seemingly accidental.

“The Invisible Bubble” by Kirk Meadowcroft

Dr. Sylvester, a brilliant physicist who became something of a recluse after the mysterious disappearance of his fiancée, gets in touch with an old aquaintance. He announces that he has been continuing the research of Curie, Ramsey and Rutherford, and invites his friend to see the fruits of his work.

After some musings about the cyclical nature of scientific enquiry (“The latest investigations into the structure of the atom have brought us perilously close to the old Greek doctrine of the essential identity of all matter. Our latest studies of electro-magnetic waves have brought us to repeat, with only the change of phrase, what Akhenaten nearly a thousand years before the Greeks, had known and felt in his worship of the Aten”) Dr. Sylvester unveils his invention, which bears a passing resemblance to a large x-ray tube. Using this device, the physicist creates a bombardment of rays (which “very nearly approach the magnitude of the ‘cosmic rays’ of Millikan”) with intriguing results:

As we approached the tube we saw forming in its centre a small bubble, black and with no trace of lustre. No light could pass the etherless space that had been blasted apart under such tremendous force. As we watched, it grew until it nearly filled the tube.

“What is it?” I exclaimed.

“You might call it the ‘Quintessence of Nothing,’” he replied. “It is a Hole in the Universe. Let us return to our shelters while I shut off the current.”

The tube remained dark. No flickering fluorescence passed over the room. Whatever rays were generated in the dark heart of the bubble were powerless to pass the space that was other than the space we know, and perhaps their titanic and struggling insulation hastened the disintegration of that three-foot portion of what had been our three-dimensional world.

The next day, the two scientists find a crowd gathered around Dr. Sylvester’s house, looking for a local boy: his voice can be heard, but he is nowhere to be seen. The crowd believes that he has simply crawled into some unseen cranny of the house — but Dr. Sylvester, having previously witnessed his fiancée vanish into thin air, has less mundane possibilities in mind…

Heading back to the invention, the scientists create another bubble, this time with additional safety precautions:

At its release the bubble, now only a shadowy gray, flattened suddenly,—assumed an amoebic form and motion and with a queer flowing, undulating movement, sent out strange pseudopodia (a sort of extension of the central mass) that seemed to feel and grasp.

Dr. Sylvester took a small tube of radium, fastened to a glass rod, and with this he drove, as it were, the strange, shapeless thing about the floor. Once he thrust the rod into its center and for a moment it assumed again its rounded shape and clung to the rod.

They experiment on the bubble by feeding it rabbits, only to find that they are unable to retrieve the unfortunate animals — although a photograph of the bubble reveals “a thing of horror—bizarre—contorted, grotesquely and agonizingly misshapen—writhing forms that filled the whole space of the bubble”.

As the narrator concludes, “I saw that the transfusion of objects into the strange universe was a reaction that could proceed in that one direction only—that some strong balance favored the unknown side.”

Disturbed by the implications of their discovery, the two scientists agree to destroy the apparatus and all papers. It is the narrator who finally does so — Dr. Sylvester having disappeared himself shortly beforehand.

Based on the idea “that the boundary lines, of space and hyper-space may not be so rigidly drawn as we have supposed”, the story fits in alongside Amazing’s other trans-dimensional stories such as Francis Flagg’s “The Blue Dimension” and George Paul Bauer’s “Below the Infra-Red”. “The Invisible Bubble” is more horrific than these, the ambiguity of the phenomena it depicts making it both more disturbing and more convincing. It is still a rather slight story, however, lacking the full-bloodedness that an author like H. P. Lovecraft might have brought to the subject matter.

“Unlocking the Past” by David H. Keller

This story deals with a scientist who is researching the theory of inherited memory:

“The psychologists have contended for years that there is such a mental process as inherited memory. Yet, since the days of Jung of Vienna, many of us have believed that everything a man and woman know is transmitted to their children and grandchildren and so on through the generations, increasing in intensity, as each pair of parents add their specific acquired knowledge to the previous store of inherited intelligence.”

The scientist and his colleagues have made a breakthrough by finding that the seemingly senseless noises made by babies are actually fragments from ancient languages such as old Coptic, Semitic, Grecian, early Latin and Chaucerian English. They take this as evidence that infants are born with ancestral memories which are obscured as their conscious minds develop; and if it were possible for the children to retain these memories, then they may be able to provide accounts of historical events. What’s more, the discovery could lead to evidence of inherited talents: “The son of an Edison or Ford could simply continue where the father had stopped when the child was created.”

All that is needed for this is “some method of tearing down the tremendous barrier between the past memories and the present consciousness”. The researchers have already had some success, by prompting an illiterate man to reproduce his grandfather’s signature, and now hope to experiment on a baby. “And after we had shown what we could do with one baby, with a dozen, we should be able to have a law passed that would give us the right to give every child such a treatment the day it was born.” He finds a suitable child in one Angelica Howes, and although Angelica’s mother is initially reluctant to consent to the experiments, despite the promise that they will benefit the girl (“Of course the child will be rather unusual for a few years, but when it reaches maturity it will at once assume a position of renown in a scientific and educational world”) the scientist wins over her and her husband by offering a pension to alleviate the family’s poverty.

After a process involving masks and tubes, the baby begins conversing fluently about a Spanish ancestor:

“Something happened to me and now it seems I can remember everything. I was her daughter and somehow I was great-great- grandmother also and a lot of other people I am just beginning to remember. But I remember her well. She was born in Sweden and her husband met her while he was Ambassador from Spain. She was a lovely lady though she always sighed for the snow-clad mountains of her native land.”

The baby turns out to have inherited the knowledge of a dictionary-writer and the speech patterns of a poet (“every year and every moment of the past comes vividly to me on the crest of the waves like driftage from the Sargasso Sea”). Meanwhile, the mother — who underwent the same process — becomes similarly perplexed by her memories:

Another psychic phenomena that puzzled her was her sex, for in some generations she had been a woman and in other periods a man, and as she tried to evaluate this, she realized that she was as much male as female, only for the time being her spirit was in the body of a woman, and stranger yet, there seemed to be a time when she was both sexes in the same body, only then she was some peculiar kind of reptile, and she prayed in her despair.

Together, mother and daughter discuss the anxieties that come from their newfound memories. They are forced to recall all manner of woes from war to poverty, and even their most peaceful recollections are filled with day-to-day arguments and annoyances. “There was no golden age in the past”, says the baby. “Our race is climbing heavenward but there is still mud on our feet and blood on our hands. I wish, Mother Dear, that I was just a little ignorant baby once more.” All the mother can do is pray:

She stole back to her bed and tried to sleep, and as she lay there she prayed for the thing she wanted most, and as she prayed she saw an enormous blackboard in front of her and on it was written all that her ancestors had ever known and done and thought, and as she saw the record, she closed her eyes and refused to look, yet through the closed lids the images burned into her mind.

Finally she looked again, and now the board was clean save only in one little corner, and she knew that record to be her own life; yet here and there on the board were little remnants of past centuries. Knowing that her prayer had been answered, she fell asleep.

“Unlocking the Past” is a story with an unusual premise and an effective execution. The result is an original, inventive and genuinely eerie science-gone-wrong narrative.

“The Great Steel Panic” by Fletcher Pratt

Authorities in New York are perturbed to find that the cables of Brooklyn Bridge have been severed: “It looked like the work of a maniac or some superior bit of Bolshevik frightfulness”, remarks the police commissioner. Officers are put on duty to guard the bridge, but somehow the cuts still keep occurring. And so the commissioner hires Walter Weyl, a consulting biologist who had previously helped the New York police to tackle a giant rodent problem, to look into the matter.

Weyl is sceptical about the commissioner’s talk of politically-motivated sabotage (“Hert thinks it’s radicals, but Hert sees red flannel bogies under every bush”) despite the police receiving a crank letter expressing support for the anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti – who, in real life, had been executed the year before the story was published. Meanwhile, disasters pile up across New York: falling elevators, subway crashes and chunks of buildings tumbling onto people below.

Finally, Weyl comes forward with the results of his analysis. He reveals that iron and steel objects have been damaged throughout the city, leading not only to major disasters but also to smaller mishaps such as broken typewriters or faulty cellar-gratings. Examining a specimen of the affected metal under a microscope, he found “a perfectly extraordinary number of a hitherto uncatalogued type of bacteria, ladder-like in form and perfectly amazing in activity.” He blames the police for being too caught up in hunting terrorists to notice a tell-tale sign of this metal-eating bacteria: that the metal continues to deteriorate even after the initial severance.

Furthermore, Weyl finds a possible way of dealing with the metal sickness. Noting that power cables, telephone wires and live subway rails are unaffected, he realises that the bacteria can be fought off using electricity.

“The Great Steel Panic” (which, like Fletcher Pratt’s previous story for Amazing, is co-attributed to Irvin Lester, actually a pseudonym of Pratt) is a strong variation on the scientific detective theme. Pratt keeps the mystery-solving structure but completely does away with issues of human motive, with successful results: this is a short but engaging story, let down only by a rather abrupt ending, where the characters brush away the question of where the bacteria came from in the first place.

The Skylark of Space by Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby (Part 2 of 3)

After the earthbound instalment of the previous issue, the second part of The Skylark of Space takes flight as its colourful characters – both good and evil – begin a spacefaring voyage.

Richard Seaton and Martin Crane have succeeded in building their spacecraft, the Skylark, and powering it with the mysterious element known as X. However, the corrupt World Steel Corporation has built its own ship using stolen plans. Piloting this vessel, the amoral scientist DuQuesne and the burglar Perkins kidnap Seaton’s fiancée Dorothy, along with Margaret Spencer – daughter of a businessman swindled by the World Steel Corporation.

The ship has the capability of going faster than light (the characters show cavalier disregard for Einstein’s theories) and the high speed causes the villainous crewmen to lose their bearings, ending up adrift in space. Making the best of a bad thing, the captive women tuck into a zero-gravity meal. But then the ship gets sucked into the orbit of a dead star, and begins getting tugged towards its surface…

Fortunately, DuQuesne is planted with a tracking device, and so the heroes are able to fly the Skylark up to the villains’ ship and save the occupants – with the exception of Perkins, who is killed by DuQuesne during a scuffle. They are still left with the problem of getting back home, however.

The mismatched band of two heroes, two heroines and one villain begin to examine the uncharted planets around them, in the hopes of finding copper to use as fuel. The crew land on a world with plants and conclude that it exists in an equivalent to Earth’s Carboniferous age, too young to have evolved anything like humans. The planet is, however, home to an alien beast with four legs, a body a hundred feet long, and an extended neck culminating in a large mouth, like some sort of cross between a diplodocus and a lamprey. As the Skylark tries to escape it is attacked by various other alien dinosaurs, along with a tree that lashes them with barbed, tentacle-like vines.

The next planet the crew visit is inhabited by a psychic being that can control matter with its mind. It shapeshifts first into a clone of Seaton, then into Dorothy, and concludes that the Earthlings are too primitive to be worth hosting on the planet. It tries to kill them, but they fight back with an X-powered explosive that shocks the alien into its true form as a fanged, clawed creature. After a mental battle the alien is persuaded to let the travellers on their way.

Coming to the third planet on its voyage, the Skylark encounters an aerial battle between aircraft and winged, tentacled monsters. Seaton and crew help the latter to fight off the former, and are welcomed by the planet’s race: statuesque humanoids with green skin. At least, their skin appears to be green, although this may be a trick of the light, as the planet has a range of weird colours unknown on Earth. In what is possibly a piece of social commentary on Smith’s part, the skin colours of these people reflect their class: the elites have dark skin; the servants medium skin; and the slaves light skin. The instalment ends with the protagonists preparing to spend the night in the home of an alien chief, undecided as to whether they are guests or prisoners…

Poetry

The issue also includes another poem by Leland S. Copeland, “Life”:

Dear Life, you come so very dear

To give your boon to me,

From primal cell and ancient worm,

And fish that ruled the sea;

Through saurian that drowned at noon

And mammal lodged in tree;

Through apish wight and troglodyte

You come so far to me.

Dear Life that came so very far

You must not leave too soon,

For I who find your presence sweet

Am loath to lose the boon.

But, Life, because your creatures fill

The earth and air and sea,

Too well I know that when you go

You cannot grieve for me.

Discussions

In this month’s letters column, Ted Cameron objects to the magazine’s prophetic pretensions:

I am college trained, and so perhaps have acquired the unusual idea of obtaining my facts directly rather than second-hand. For instance, William Lowell is a far more instructive authority on Mars than is Baron Munchhausen. And Edgar Rice Burroughs is certainly more entertaining.

I read scientifiction, not as a prophecy of the future, but as entertainment. Why not stress that side of it more. Your present attitude smacks too much of attempting to justify yourself because your stores are not chronicles of fact. You aren’t conducting a personal tour through the pages of Euclid or anything of that sort. So please stop telling us to look upon these stories as prophesying the future and permit us to enjoy them as fiction.

The editorial response pleads of the magazine’s stories that “if you will look a little further, you will find a prophetic value in some of them, and we are sure that ten years from now many of them wdll be read like true prophecy.”

19-year-old John J. Kelly derides Amazing’s detective fiction (“it has no place in a publication which claims to be THE magazine of scientifiction”), calls for the title to be changed to Scientifiction Magazine (“Upon asking for a copy of Amazing Stories at the news stand, I was informed that it had not yet been received, and the newsdealer promptly told me that he bad Weird Tales and Ghost Stories. I was mortified. If there is anything that humiliates me, and I think that is typical of many people, it is anything that tends to give the impression that I am stimulated by superstitious hair-raising ghost stories, et cetera”) before listing a few more suggestions relating to the magazine’s formatting.

Also on the critical front, George Sanders (not, presumably, that one) splutters that “The editing and proofreading of your scientifiction magazine is simply fierce, misprints on every page, bad grammar, and worst of all, the most ridiculous contributions”; as examples of the last problem, he lists a number of self-contradictory statements from the June edition of Baron Munchhausen’s New Scientific Adventures.

16-year-old Harold Scott offers a set of “bouquets and cabbages”. His objections draw heavily upon the periodic table, as he complains about authors who invent imaginary elements.

14-year-old George Hudson says that Wells “is classed with Scott and Shakespeare” and disagrees with those who criticise the magazine’s covers: “The covers are masterpieces, of genius and imagination on the part of Mr. Paul – The one in the April 1928 issue should have a place in the Art Gallery”. Howard Campaigne is another who praises Paul’s artwork, even asking for additional illustrations (“At least one to every two pages”).

One letter praises Verne and Wells while disparaging A. Merritt (“I think that some of A. Merritt’s, such as The Moon Pool and The Face in the Abyss run a trifle too strong on the impossible order, with little or no science, and without even the redeeming feature of a happy ending”) before discussing the March 1928 issue, pointing out scientific implausibilities in Geoffrey Hewelcke’s “Ten Million Miles Sunward” and passing thought on Gernsback’s editorial on insect intelligence (prompting the editorial reply to recommend The Ant People by Franz Ewers and The Life of the White Ant by Maurice Maeterlinck) The long letter goes on to reply to another correspondent in the same issue:

Commenting on the letter of T. A. Netland of Oakland, California, published in the March edition—I believe that most of our fiction writers aim to make their stories true to life as they see it, and in line with public opinion. The spirit of selfishness and other inhuman characteristics which still seem to dominate the human race are traits inherited from our animal ancestors, without which evolution would have been impossible. The continual struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest, resulted -in the weeding out of the unfit, and was the means of bringing man up to the present standard. The human race is still far from true civilization. The martial spirit and other inhuman traits are relics of barbarism, and may take thousands of years yet to eradicate. The “Towers of Humanity” Mr. Netland mentions, such as Buddha, Jesus, Confucius, etc. were, I believe, born thousands of years ahead of their time, and may be considered as forerunners of what the human race may be in time to come; with the exception that superstition and fanaticism will he replaced in the new civilization by logic and good sound sense.

S. N. Moberley raises the question of how the ambulant bread in Keller’s “The Yeast Men” ended up marching in the right direction when the story indicates that their initial movements would have been random. Jacob Schwartz writes on a similar matter, asking why the enemy army didn’t simply turn the Yeast Men around. The editorial response suggests that there were simply too many for this to be viable.

Schwartz also praises the work of A. Merritt, as does Robert C. Schaller in the next letter:

I know not how your other readers may feel about it, but for myself, in view of his lyric and epic masterpiece, The Moon Pool—for it is evident to any who read it intelligently that Merritt has Miltonic visions, vast shadowy splendors, which he has the power to express in undeniably poetic prose with dashes of Keats and Shelley—as I say, in view of that achievement, as well as The Metal Monster, a pure epic poem, ’tis clear that if he is encouraged, he will produce an abiding contribution to the literature of imagination in the promised sequel to The Face in the Abyss.

14-year-olds Vivian Chudom and Lottie Pitman provide what is headed “A Charming Letter From Two Young School Girls”. “We read your Discussion section as well as the rest of the magazine with great interest every month, and have not noticed letters from many girls in the teen age”, they say. “This certainly cannot be because girls do not read Amazing Stories. Whenever we bring our magazine to school, everyone wants to borrow it at once.” They go on to question the scientific merit of “Pollock and the Porroh Man” (while also acknowledging it as “more interesting than most of H. G. Wells’ stories” and express interest in the often-discussed science club. M. M. Perelstein also brings up the science club, and outlines a possible way of structuring it.

Yet aother reader interested in the science club is 15-year-old Thaddeus Whalen, who praises the magazine for offering information as well as entertainment: “I think now that I can look the world more in the face and say “I know you and your secrets, and if you have secrets unsolved I will try and solve them in some of my wild dreams.” Indeed, as he goes on to say, “if my parents and neighbors call me crazy, ‘goofey’ and any other popular nickname I know some people that will stand by me, they arc the devout readers and editors of Amazing Stories. I feel no enmity or fear toward them because the age is fast coming where truth will dominate.” Meanwhile, a 14-year-old reader writes that “In my classes Amazing Stories has received severe comment. I uphold the magazine and can, always quiet a scoffer by asking him to prove ‘impossibilities’ in the stories or by showing — that the story under comment is written by some famous author”.

The topic of travel through other dimensions – including time – is a recurring one in the column. 16-year-old James Phelan enquires about the dimensional physics depicted in Bob Olsen’s “Great Four-Dimensional Robberies” and “The Blue Dimension” by Francis Flagg, and states that he wold like explanation from the magazine “because there is no one in my town that has the required knowledge to do so.”

Lester A. Maple hails David H. Keller as the magazine’s best writer (“I believe, are written by Dr. David H. Keller. He has the knack, which very few of your writers possess, of combining science, romance and pathos, all in the same gripping story”) and goes on to defend Wells and Verne from their detractors (“I like both, and anybody who doesn’t is probably not on a high enough intellectual plane to understand them with sufficient clarity”) before expounding — at considerable length — his contempt for time travel as a concept, although he acknowledges that it can make entertaining stories. The editorial response counters Maple’s criticisms with an excerpt from the book Gravitation- vs. Relativity by Charles Lane Poor.

Replying to an earlier letter disparaging time travel stories, Albet J. Hadvigar notes that “Glancing through the advances made in science, of electricity, chemistry and physics within the past few years, one is really dumbfounded at the rapid strides that have been taken. For just an example, The electron. It exists, it has almost no mass, its life defies all conception of time as we know time. It is there. Indisputably there. Unharnessed energy. What is it? It is there. It has been measured into our third dimension as far as its molecular construction is concerned. But the plane that it moves in has not been; when that is done I am sure that we shall be a great step nearer to the fourth dimension.”

13-year-old Leonard May also writes about the fourth dimension. “If you insist on there being a fourth dimension, why pick on time? You might as well use weight, temperature, and hardness, etc., all of which would be a lot of ‘bunk.’ True, all are factors, but they are not dimensions. Dimensions are concerned with linear measure.” He then moves on to a different topic — that of telepathy:

Mental telepathy is not impossible, as you think. Another boy and I came to talking about the subject. and we decided to give it a tryout, I closed my eyes and made my mind as complete a blank as I could, while the other tried to transmit a thought to me. I received the same thought that he sent, and that was a picture of a Yeast Man! We tried this out on each other about twenty times, using different thoughts, and six trials were successful. Try it out yourself, some day.

The editorial response to May’s comments on the fourth dimension once again includes an excerpt from Gravitation versus Relativity by Charles Lane Poor. As for telepathy, the editors are unimpressed: “Amazing Stories‘ sister magazine, Science and Invention, maintains that there is no such thing and that mental telepathy has never been proved. The magazine is willing to pay a large cash prize for absolute proof of mental telepathy.”

17-year-old Don H. Nabours takes the time travel discussion a step further, as his letter (run under the dubious header “A Very Amusing Letter; Suicide Threatened!”) is actually an impromptu piece of fiction on the topic. Don describes his science class being visited by an elderly professor who purported to be Don’s future self, outlining hoiw he invented a time travel process:

[B]eing an ardent reader of Amazing Stories my thoughts kept turning to time-traveling as the most worthwhile adventure of them all and so I set my talents along this line. I wasted six years trying to build a fourth dimensional machine but failed, then turned my attention to drugs. I have now developed a drug which does not kill the body, but allows the soul or spirit, that is, the intelligence which functions through the brain, to go free and leave the body completely, and as space and time are only encumbrances of the mortal, physical body, I can go any place and get there any time I wish.

Upon arriving in 1928, the professor’s spirit took over the body of “a healthy Idiot in the state asylum”, allowing him to visit his younger self in physical form. Young Don, however, is left distraught by the knowledge that he will become a chemistry teacher: “Now Mr. Editor, I have always planned to be an artist and thought I would be too, but it seems that I am to be a school teacher, and, as I have an artistic temperament and the weather is warm today, I think I’ll commit suicide as soon as I finish this letter.”

“Don’t you think that instead of committing suicide”, suggests the editorial reply, “you’d better form a partnership with your old friend and take a nice trip into the hereafter, and then come back and tell the readers of Amazing Stories what happened?”

15-year-old Kenneth R. Johnson argues that the controversy arising from “The Astounding Discoveries of Doctor Mentiroso” by A. Hyatt Verrill is evidence of the story’s merit: “Any story that induces so much original and constructive thought certainly deserves a place in your magazine”, defends humorous stories, praises Wells (while also deriding “Pollock and the Porroh Man” as insufficiently scientifictional), champions Baron Munchhausen’s New Scientific Adventures as the magazine’s best story to date, and wraps up by questioning the publication’s title and cover illustrations (“At present, these give the impression that the magazine is of the purely sensational type and therefore does not appeal to the better class of people.”)

C. H. Osbourne notes similarities between Cecil B. White’s “The Return of the Martians” and the second instalment of Baron Munchhausen’s New Scientific Adventures, before rambling about coincidences in general.

J. B. Dixon gives a personal ranking of the stories in the June issue, topped with Wells’ The Invisible Man (the, sequence of events is orderly, logical, and lifelike”) and tailed with David H. Keller’s “A Biological Experiment” (“Sex is one of the largest causes, of crime, and if it could be eliminated the race should be much happier instead of the opposite. As the author seems to advance the argument that it is God’s will, I refer him. to the words, of the Master, that “There will be neither marriage, nor giving in marriage in Heaven.”) The letter prompts a sardonic editorial response: “Your quotation about marriage, you will observe applies to Heaven. In spite of prohibition, the earth is far from being a heaven. If sex could, be eliminated, as you say, whether the race would be happier or not, it certainly would dwindle very rapidly.”

Amazing Histories, September 1928: A Symbol for Scientifiction Three gears are lined up against a starlit background. The gear on the left bears the word "fact"; the gear on the right, "theory".

[lopezdorothy70-blog]

Local Media in Peoria Illinois Exposes Medical Kidnapping of Young Child Due to Child Abuse Specialist

The Crady Family. Image Source.

Commentary by Terri LaPoint Health Impact News

The phrase “with liberty and justice for all” is the cornerstone of the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. This principle is the very foundation upon which our nation was founded, for which men and women have fought and died.

This noble and lofty theme is written in our anthems, on our statues, and in our hearts.

It is the very essence of who we are supposed to be as a nation that stands as a shining light among the nations, inspiring sacrifice and dedication throughout the generations to ensure that “liberty and justice for all” remains the bedrock of society for future generations to enjoy.

Where there is injustice, or when some “are more equal than others” (George Orwell, Animal Farm), ordinary people rise up and push back.

Our history is full of examples of heroes that we look up to for their courage and leadership in standing up for liberty and justice for all, against those who seek to relegate those beloved principles to a select few. Our favorite movies and books are inspired by this theme.

“Better that a guilty man go free than an innocent man be convicted” is a cherished American doctrine espoused by the Founding Fathers and passed down into the foundation of the justice system.

Yet there is an element of United States society that routinely refuses to embrace this concept, and their devastating reach has the potential to impact every family within our borders: that is, the child welfare and family court system.

Many of their policies which lead to families being torn apart trace directly to a group of doctors known as Child Abuse Pediatricians.

They author policies and position statements for the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), which are enforced by Children's Hospitals, pediatricians, and child protective agencies.

We have covered the topic of Child Abuse Pediatricians often, which is a specialty that must find child abuse to justify its existence as a medical specialty.

To learn more about this specialty see:

Are New Pediatric “Child Abuse Specialists” Causing an Increase in Medical Kidnappings?

Child Abuse Pediatricians: An “Ethically Bankrupt” Profession that Destroys Families

Pediatric Child Abuse “Experts” are NOT Experts in Anything

The AAP does not represent all pediatricians and doctors, despite public perception, and there are very qualified, excellent doctors who disagree with some of these policies.

A recent 2-part Special Report by 25 News in Peoria, Illinois, (Link to Part 1 and Part 2) examines this issue of innocent parents, who are falsely accused by doctors, whose children are medically kidnapped.

Reporter Caitlin Knute says that one local hospital, OSF St. Francis, sees about 20 cases a month of child abuse, which also includes “neglect” cases as well.

Reporter Tyler Lopez asks the question that Health Impact News has been asking even before our Medical Kidnap division was established in 2014:

But what if some of those abuse cases were misdiagnosed or the result of a medical condition?

When that happens, there is often no liberty or justice for these families.

Innocent Families Are “Collateral Damage”

Child Abuse Pediatrician Dr. Channing Petrak. Image source from video at Week.com.

Michelle Weidner, executive director of the Family Justice Resource Center, was one of numerous victims of a false allegation by a Child Abuse Pediatrician. She cuts to the heart of the matter in Part 2:

Wrongful allegations are often considered collateral damage in the fight against child abuse. And it's often not taking into consideration the impact that wrongful allegations have on families.

Her baby was taken because Child Abuse Pediatrician Dr. Channing Petrak at OSC St. Francis misread a CT scan and accused the parents of abuse:

“When they did the CT scan he moved in the machine, which resulted in a blurred line, and that blurred line was misdiagnosed as a skull fracture,” Weidner explains.

Unfortunately, the Weidners wouldn't learn there was a problem with the scan till much later. Instead, in that moment, they found themselves accused.

“And the child abuse pediatrician told investigators that there was no other explanation than blunt force trauma,” Weidner adds.

In one of our earliest Medical Kidnap stories, a Child Abuse Pediatrician compared parents Bethany and Andrew Debski to dolphins caught in a net. Like hundreds of families whose stories we have covered since then, they too were collateral damage:

A child abuse doctor at Helen DeVos Children's Hospital (HDVCH) in Grand Rapids, Michigan, actually thanked them for “taking a hard hit for the greater good” of catching abused and neglected children. They were innocent.

See:

Parents Falsely Accused by CPS Fight to Get Reputation Back – Pay Forced Hospital Bills

Baby Chandler's Story

The 25 News report starts with the story of Baby Chandler, a story that follows the template of dozens of other stories that we have covered involving a child with broken bones who actually had a medical condition causing his bone fragility.

Dr. Channing Petrak, Child Abuse Pediatrician, accused the parents of abuse, and he was taken from his mother by Illinois Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS).

According to Part 1:

Chandler was born premature with a host of health problems, including a hole in his lung. He spent the first week of his life at the hospital. After he was released, his parents, Tara and Michael Crady, said they noticed one of his ankles felt strange, and brought it up to their pediatrician.

“The next morning we got a phone call saying, 'You know, were you in a car accident? Was there some sort of trauma during pregnancy?' And I said, 'No. I said why?' They said, 'Well, it's a healed fracture and it would date back to in utero,” Tara explained.

From there it was back to OSF St. Francis Medical Center for more testing. But, what was supposed to be a routine follow up X-ray quickly escalated as the Cradys were told Chandler had 14 healed fractures, including 12 along his ribs.

The hospital called DCFS.

The Cradys say they were forced to stay at OSF under constant supervision for the next week while DCFS called in a Child Abuse Pediatrician, Dr. Channing Petrak, the Medical Director of the Pediatric Resource Center.

In her report provided by the family, Dr. Petrak ruled the fractures and other injuries were “suspicious of abuse.”

Specialist in Radiology, Dr. Ayoub, Disagreed with Child Abuse Doctor

Radiologist Dr. David Ayoub. Image source.

Fortunately, Tara Crady remembered reading about a similar story a few years ago in the news, and she was able to find the mother on Facebook. Dr. Petrack was also behind Michelle Weidner's false allegation of abuse. Part 1 continues:

“While we were in the hospital I contacted Michelle Weidner and she got me in contact with this radiologist out of Springfield and by the grace of God he met us at like 6:30 that night at the hospital.”

That doctor was David Ayoub, M.D., a radiologist who specializes in these types of cases.

“There's no question in my mind that they were abnormal bones, bones that showed fragility,” Ayoub declared.

From Chandler's X-rays and interviews with the family, Dr. Ayoub determined Chandler had metabolic bone disease, possibly infantile rickets, and said the healed fractures that appeared on the x-rays dated back to in utero and/or the birthing process.

Healing Rib Fractures Happened in the Womb

Many Medical Kidnap stories that we have covered involve babies who are discovered to have “multiple rib fractures in various stages of healing.” (See link to such stories.)

That particular phrase is in the medical reports of just about every story that we have investigated involving children with broken bones whose parents were accused of child abuse but were found by experts (other than Child Abuse doctors who really are not experts in anything) to have legitimate medical conditions, such as infantile rickets, osteogenesis imperfecta, collagen disorders such as Ehlers Danlos Syndrome, or other brittle bones condition.

25 News continues in Part 1:

“In utero fractures I've seen reported. They're not unheard of, but they are exceptionally rare.” Ayoub began. “Now, Chandler had x-rays at birth which is a little bit unusual. Why? Because he had a long injury at birth, which is one of the first clues that his ribs might've been injured at birth. If the ribs are weak at birth and the child passes through the birth canal what happens is those ribs don't hold up so they are pushed into the one tissue with much greater force than they would otherwise,” Ayoub further explained, demonstrating the squeezing motion with both hands.

Dr. Ayoub said that would account for the punctured lung Chandler was born with. He also said that while Dr. Petrak's report might have stated they ruled out rickets or metabolic bone disease, that was because the tests they conducted in the hospital, measuring the boy's Vitamin D levels (an indicator in those cases,) were done at the time the injuries were discovered, not when the injuries would have occurred, adding that Vitamin D levels could change drastically for a developing child in that time.

“In infancy, it's not like any other time in life. The vitamin D levels change and change dramatically within the first three months of life. The baby will be born with typically 60% to 70% of the mother's levels and will double very quickly, in fact by 2 to 3 months those levels double,” Ayoub shared.

With that theory in mind, Ayoub said Tara's levels of Vitamin D were measured and found to be 21.8, emaning Chandler's on average would have been around 14, which was considered low. Ayoub noted this and other findings that he felt explained the injuries discovered in a report the family sent to a judge before their first Shelter Care Hearing.

Including Ayoub, the Cradys ending up seeking out a total of 8 medical expert from all over the country, all specializing in unique cases like there. Among the group of Ivy League, board Certified specialists, was a Boston University Endocrinologist, Dr. Michael Holick. Holick not only agreed with Ayoub's findings, he also testified in a report submitted to the court that Chandler likely had a collagen disorder called Ehlers-danlos syndrome. Holick said that would be enough to “markedly increase the risk for fragility fractures with normal handling.”

The Cradys eventually got their son back, but not before their family was unnecessarily traumatized by the actions of the Child Abuse Pediatrician Dr. Petrak and DCFS.

Innocent Father Went to Prison over False Diagnosis of Abuse by Petrak

Richard Britts. Image source.

Part 2 of the 25 News Special Report includes the story of an innocent dad who not only lost time with his children, but also spent 2 years in prison for a crime that didn't happen, based on the testimony of a Child Abuse Pediatrician.

His 3-month-old daughter “starting gasping for breath in her crib” while the 19-year-old father was watching TV.

“I just didn't know what to do, she was lifeless, she was still gasping, breathing very weird. I called her mother and I called 911 and they walked me through CPR which is probably the scariest thing ever did in my life,” Britts recalls.

The little girl was taken to a nearby hospital before being transported to OSF in Peoria, where doctors determined she had bleeding on the brain, and Britts says that prompted Dr. Petrak to conclude Saniya had been either shaken or hit.

Britts says he protested and told staff seizures ran in his family. Ultimately, though, he was arrested and taken to the Sangamon County Jail after he claims he was coerced into a confession without an attorney present.

“I didn't know what was happening. I was 19 and they're just telling me everything that I did was inaccurate. I couldn't answer their questions,” Britts began, adding that in the end he felt worn down by the interrogations. He claims in an attempt to bring things to an end, he finally admitted if they thought he did something he must have, even though he didn't know what that “something” was, not fully realizing that would be interpreted as a confession.

Britts spent more than 2 years in jail awaiting trial, where he was eventually found not guilty after a medical expert from out-of-state testified Saniya did, in fact, suffer from a seizure disorder. Since then he says he's rebuilt his life, and enjoys time with Saniya, who made a full recovery, and her three sisters.

Still, he says nothing can replace the time that was taken from him.

“That's 2 1/2 years I'll never get back I had to reestablish the relationships with my children. Man, I lost a lot. I lost my home, I lost two jobs, I lost my marriage, my father passed when I was there,” he laments.

Organization Helps Families Fight Against False Allegations of Abuse

The Family Justice Resource Center (FJRC) was founded in Illinois to help families such as these. Chicago area attorney Diane Redleaf is on the organization's board, and she has written extensively on the subject of ethical concerns with Child Protective Services and Child Abuse Pediatricians.

See:

Family Defense Center in Illinois Documents Medical Ethics Violations in Medical Kidnappings

According to 25 News:

She's written a just-published book on the subject, profiling six families, “They Took the Kids Last Night: How the Child Protection System Puts Families At Risk.” [Source].

“The stories are all cases of families where the child welfare system came in and literally took the kids one night,” Redleaf explains.

Redleaf estimates she's worked on anywhere from 70 to 100 cases involving families whose children allegedly had medical conditions that were mistaken for abuse.

“I believe any family could be subject to something like this and people need to basically have a wake-up call that this is occurring,” she emphatically states.

Dr. Ayoub is a medical specialist in radiology who is well-qualified as an expert in bone conditions.

Many families whose stories we have covered have looked to him for answers when the Child Abuse Pediatricians with the focus of finding abuse have accused them when they knew there had to be another answer. (See link).

Dr. Ayoub is one of the experts that FJRC consults. He told 25 News:

“I think when you look at the specialty of child abuse pediatrics you are geared up to protect children in harm's way. So one of the first things you see, in other words, if you're a nail everything is a hammer or vice versa. And there's a specialty bias that we all have,” explained Dr. David Ayoub, MD.

Dr. Ayoub says he's studied metabolic bone disease, rickets, and vitamin D deficiencies extensively and believes those conditions can often mimic abuse. As a result, he testifies in cases all over the country.

True Justice and One-Sided Child Abuse Doctor Opinions Incompatible Concepts

If we are to hope to secure true justice for families, including the basic liberty of parents and children to be in relationship with one another, courts and agencies must stop looking to Child Abuse Pediatricians as the ultimate authority on what constitutes abuse.

They have a financial stake in ruling abuse, even if their is none.

They simply get it wrong in too many cases, devastating innocent families, even sending innocent parents to prison and their children into foster care situations where there they often encounter true abuse that they never experienced in their own home.

There is no consensus among true experts that the conclusions reached by Child Abuse Pediatricians are accurate, while there are many cases where truly qualified medical experts find legitimate medical conditions that mimic abuse in these children.

Justice demands that the other side of the story is heard and taken seriously, not ignored, as so often happens in juvenile and family courts today.

Comment on this article at MedicalKidnap.com.

See Also:

Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts Opens the Legal Door to Retry All Shaken Baby Syndrome Convictions

University of Michigan Law School Awarded $250K to Learn How to Defend Shaken Baby Syndrome Cases

Attorneys Being Trained to Fight Bogus Child Abuse Charges used in Medical Kidnappings

Swedish Health Agency Rejects “Science” of Shaken Baby Syndrome

World Renowned Neuropathologist has Career Destroyed for Disproving Shaken Baby Syndrome

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[battybat-boss]

Local Media in Peoria Illinois Exposes Medical Kidnapping of Young Child Due to Child Abuse Specialist

The Crady Family. Image Source.

Commentary by Terri LaPoint Health Impact News

The phrase “with liberty and justice for all” is the cornerstone of the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. This principle is the very foundation upon which our nation was founded, for which men and women have fought and died.

This noble and lofty theme is written in our anthems, on our statues, and in our hearts.

It is the very essence of who we are supposed to be as a nation that stands as a shining light among the nations, inspiring sacrifice and dedication throughout the generations to ensure that “liberty and justice for all” remains the bedrock of society for future generations to enjoy.

Where there is injustice, or when some “are more equal than others” (George Orwell, Animal Farm), ordinary people rise up and push back.

Our history is full of examples of heroes that we look up to for their courage and leadership in standing up for liberty and justice for all, against those who seek to relegate those beloved principles to a select few. Our favorite movies and books are inspired by this theme.

“Better that a guilty man go free than an innocent man be convicted” is a cherished American doctrine espoused by the Founding Fathers and passed down into the foundation of the justice system.

Yet there is an element of United States society that routinely refuses to embrace this concept, and their devastating reach has the potential to impact every family within our borders: that is, the child welfare and family court system.

Many of their policies which lead to families being torn apart trace directly to a group of doctors known as Child Abuse Pediatricians.

They author policies and position statements for the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), which are enforced by Children's Hospitals, pediatricians, and child protective agencies.

We have covered the topic of Child Abuse Pediatricians often, which is a specialty that must find child abuse to justify its existence as a medical specialty.

To learn more about this specialty see:

Are New Pediatric “Child Abuse Specialists” Causing an Increase in Medical Kidnappings?

Child Abuse Pediatricians: An “Ethically Bankrupt” Profession that Destroys Families

Pediatric Child Abuse “Experts” are NOT Experts in Anything

The AAP does not represent all pediatricians and doctors, despite public perception, and there are very qualified, excellent doctors who disagree with some of these policies.

A recent 2-part Special Report by 25 News in Peoria, Illinois, (Link to Part 1 and Part 2) examines this issue of innocent parents, who are falsely accused by doctors, whose children are medically kidnapped.

Reporter Caitlin Knute says that one local hospital, OSF St. Francis, sees about 20 cases a month of child abuse, which also includes “neglect” cases as well.

Reporter Tyler Lopez asks the question that Health Impact News has been asking even before our Medical Kidnap division was established in 2014:

But what if some of those abuse cases were misdiagnosed or the result of a medical condition?

When that happens, there is often no liberty or justice for these families.

Innocent Families Are “Collateral Damage”

Child Abuse Pediatrician Dr. Channing Petrak. Image source from video at Week.com.

Michelle Weidner, executive director of the Family Justice Resource Center, was one of numerous victims of a false allegation by a Child Abuse Pediatrician. She cuts to the heart of the matter in Part 2:

Wrongful allegations are often considered collateral damage in the fight against child abuse. And it's often not taking into consideration the impact that wrongful allegations have on families.

Her baby was taken because Child Abuse Pediatrician Dr. Channing Petrak at OSC St. Francis misread a CT scan and accused the parents of abuse:

“When they did the CT scan he moved in the machine, which resulted in a blurred line, and that blurred line was misdiagnosed as a skull fracture,” Weidner explains.

Unfortunately, the Weidners wouldn't learn there was a problem with the scan till much later. Instead, in that moment, they found themselves accused.

“And the child abuse pediatrician told investigators that there was no other explanation than blunt force trauma,” Weidner adds.

In one of our earliest Medical Kidnap stories, a Child Abuse Pediatrician compared parents Bethany and Andrew Debski to dolphins caught in a net. Like hundreds of families whose stories we have covered since then, they too were collateral damage:

A child abuse doctor at Helen DeVos Children's Hospital (HDVCH) in Grand Rapids, Michigan, actually thanked them for “taking a hard hit for the greater good” of catching abused and neglected children. They were innocent.

See:

Parents Falsely Accused by CPS Fight to Get Reputation Back – Pay Forced Hospital Bills

Baby Chandler's Story

The 25 News report starts with the story of Baby Chandler, a story that follows the template of dozens of other stories that we have covered involving a child with broken bones who actually had a medical condition causing his bone fragility.

Dr. Channing Petrak, Child Abuse Pediatrician, accused the parents of abuse, and he was taken from his mother by Illinois Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS).

According to Part 1:

Chandler was born premature with a host of health problems, including a hole in his lung. He spent the first week of his life at the hospital. After he was released, his parents, Tara and Michael Crady, said they noticed one of his ankles felt strange, and brought it up to their pediatrician.

“The next morning we got a phone call saying, 'You know, were you in a car accident? Was there some sort of trauma during pregnancy?' And I said, 'No. I said why?' They said, 'Well, it's a healed fracture and it would date back to in utero,” Tara explained.

From there it was back to OSF St. Francis Medical Center for more testing. But, what was supposed to be a routine follow up X-ray quickly escalated as the Cradys were told Chandler had 14 healed fractures, including 12 along his ribs.

The hospital called DCFS.

The Cradys say they were forced to stay at OSF under constant supervision for the next week while DCFS called in a Child Abuse Pediatrician, Dr. Channing Petrak, the Medical Director of the Pediatric Resource Center.

In her report provided by the family, Dr. Petrak ruled the fractures and other injuries were “suspicious of abuse.”

Specialist in Radiology, Dr. Ayoub, Disagreed with Child Abuse Doctor

Radiologist Dr. David Ayoub. Image source.

Fortunately, Tara Crady remembered reading about a similar story a few years ago in the news, and she was able to find the mother on Facebook. Dr. Petrack was also behind Michelle Weidner's false allegation of abuse. Part 1 continues:

“While we were in the hospital I contacted Michelle Weidner and she got me in contact with this radiologist out of Springfield and by the grace of God he met us at like 6:30 that night at the hospital.”

That doctor was David Ayoub, M.D., a radiologist who specializes in these types of cases.

“There's no question in my mind that they were abnormal bones, bones that showed fragility,” Ayoub declared.

From Chandler's X-rays and interviews with the family, Dr. Ayoub determined Chandler had metabolic bone disease, possibly infantile rickets, and said the healed fractures that appeared on the x-rays dated back to in utero and/or the birthing process.

Healing Rib Fractures Happened in the Womb

Many Medical Kidnap stories that we have covered involve babies who are discovered to have “multiple rib fractures in various stages of healing.” (See link to such stories.)

That particular phrase is in the medical reports of just about every story that we have investigated involving children with broken bones whose parents were accused of child abuse but were found by experts (other than Child Abuse doctors who really are not experts in anything) to have legitimate medical conditions, such as infantile rickets, osteogenesis imperfecta, collagen disorders such as Ehlers Danlos Syndrome, or other brittle bones condition.

25 News continues in Part 1:

“In utero fractures I've seen reported. They're not unheard of, but they are exceptionally rare.” Ayoub began. “Now, Chandler had x-rays at birth which is a little bit unusual. Why? Because he had a long injury at birth, which is one of the first clues that his ribs might've been injured at birth. If the ribs are weak at birth and the child passes through the birth canal what happens is those ribs don't hold up so they are pushed into the one tissue with much greater force than they would otherwise,” Ayoub further explained, demonstrating the squeezing motion with both hands.

Dr. Ayoub said that would account for the punctured lung Chandler was born with. He also said that while Dr. Petrak's report might have stated they ruled out rickets or metabolic bone disease, that was because the tests they conducted in the hospital, measuring the boy's Vitamin D levels (an indicator in those cases,) were done at the time the injuries were discovered, not when the injuries would have occurred, adding that Vitamin D levels could change drastically for a developing child in that time.

“In infancy, it's not like any other time in life. The vitamin D levels change and change dramatically within the first three months of life. The baby will be born with typically 60% to 70% of the mother's levels and will double very quickly, in fact by 2 to 3 months those levels double,” Ayoub shared.

With that theory in mind, Ayoub said Tara's levels of Vitamin D were measured and found to be 21.8, emaning Chandler's on average would have been around 14, which was considered low. Ayoub noted this and other findings that he felt explained the injuries discovered in a report the family sent to a judge before their first Shelter Care Hearing.

Including Ayoub, the Cradys ending up seeking out a total of 8 medical expert from all over the country, all specializing in unique cases like there. Among the group of Ivy League, board Certified specialists, was a Boston University Endocrinologist, Dr. Michael Holick. Holick not only agreed with Ayoub's findings, he also testified in a report submitted to the court that Chandler likely had a collagen disorder called Ehlers-danlos syndrome. Holick said that would be enough to “markedly increase the risk for fragility fractures with normal handling.”

The Cradys eventually got their son back, but not before their family was unnecessarily traumatized by the actions of the Child Abuse Pediatrician Dr. Petrak and DCFS.

Innocent Father Went to Prison over False Diagnosis of Abuse by Petrak

Richard Britts. Image source.

Part 2 of the 25 News Special Report includes the story of an innocent dad who not only lost time with his children, but also spent 2 years in prison for a crime that didn't happen, based on the testimony of a Child Abuse Pediatrician.

His 3-month-old daughter “starting gasping for breath in her crib” while the 19-year-old father was watching TV.

“I just didn't know what to do, she was lifeless, she was still gasping, breathing very weird. I called her mother and I called 911 and they walked me through CPR which is probably the scariest thing ever did in my life,” Britts recalls.

The little girl was taken to a nearby hospital before being transported to OSF in Peoria, where doctors determined she had bleeding on the brain, and Britts says that prompted Dr. Petrak to conclude Saniya had been either shaken or hit.

Britts says he protested and told staff seizures ran in his family. Ultimately, though, he was arrested and taken to the Sangamon County Jail after he claims he was coerced into a confession without an attorney present.

“I didn't know what was happening. I was 19 and they're just telling me everything that I did was inaccurate. I couldn't answer their questions,” Britts began, adding that in the end he felt worn down by the interrogations. He claims in an attempt to bring things to an end, he finally admitted if they thought he did something he must have, even though he didn't know what that “something” was, not fully realizing that would be interpreted as a confession.

Britts spent more than 2 years in jail awaiting trial, where he was eventually found not guilty after a medical expert from out-of-state testified Saniya did, in fact, suffer from a seizure disorder. Since then he says he's rebuilt his life, and enjoys time with Saniya, who made a full recovery, and her three sisters.

Still, he says nothing can replace the time that was taken from him.

“That's 2 1/2 years I'll never get back I had to reestablish the relationships with my children. Man, I lost a lot. I lost my home, I lost two jobs, I lost my marriage, my father passed when I was there,” he laments.

Organization Helps Families Fight Against False Allegations of Abuse

The Family Justice Resource Center (FJRC) was founded in Illinois to help families such as these. Chicago area attorney Diane Redleaf is on the organization's board, and she has written extensively on the subject of ethical concerns with Child Protective Services and Child Abuse Pediatricians.

See:

Family Defense Center in Illinois Documents Medical Ethics Violations in Medical Kidnappings

According to 25 News:

She's written a just-published book on the subject, profiling six families, “They Took the Kids Last Night: How the Child Protection System Puts Families At Risk.” [Source].

“The stories are all cases of families where the child welfare system came in and literally took the kids one night,” Redleaf explains.

Redleaf estimates she's worked on anywhere from 70 to 100 cases involving families whose children allegedly had medical conditions that were mistaken for abuse.

“I believe any family could be subject to something like this and people need to basically have a wake-up call that this is occurring,” she emphatically states.

Dr. Ayoub is a medical specialist in radiology who is well-qualified as an expert in bone conditions.

Many families whose stories we have covered have looked to him for answers when the Child Abuse Pediatricians with the focus of finding abuse have accused them when they knew there had to be another answer. (See link).

Dr. Ayoub is one of the experts that FJRC consults. He told 25 News:

“I think when you look at the specialty of child abuse pediatrics you are geared up to protect children in harm's way. So one of the first things you see, in other words, if you're a nail everything is a hammer or vice versa. And there's a specialty bias that we all have,” explained Dr. David Ayoub, MD.

Dr. Ayoub says he's studied metabolic bone disease, rickets, and vitamin D deficiencies extensively and believes those conditions can often mimic abuse. As a result, he testifies in cases all over the country.

True Justice and One-Sided Child Abuse Doctor Opinions Incompatible Concepts

If we are to hope to secure true justice for families, including the basic liberty of parents and children to be in relationship with one another, courts and agencies must stop looking to Child Abuse Pediatricians as the ultimate authority on what constitutes abuse.

They have a financial stake in ruling abuse, even if their is none.

They simply get it wrong in too many cases, devastating innocent families, even sending innocent parents to prison and their children into foster care situations where there they often encounter true abuse that they never experienced in their own home.

There is no consensus among true experts that the conclusions reached by Child Abuse Pediatricians are accurate, while there are many cases where truly qualified medical experts find legitimate medical conditions that mimic abuse in these children.

Justice demands that the other side of the story is heard and taken seriously, not ignored, as so often happens in juvenile and family courts today.

Comment on this article at MedicalKidnap.com.

See Also:

Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts Opens the Legal Door to Retry All Shaken Baby Syndrome Convictions

University of Michigan Law School Awarded $250K to Learn How to Defend Shaken Baby Syndrome Cases

Attorneys Being Trained to Fight Bogus Child Abuse Charges used in Medical Kidnappings

Swedish Health Agency Rejects “Science” of Shaken Baby Syndrome

World Renowned Neuropathologist has Career Destroyed for Disproving Shaken Baby Syndrome

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[isslibrary]

New Books (late September)

Sorted by Call Number / Author. These are in the New Books section (by the superhero posters in the Reading Room) except the ones marked CI (Confucius Institute Collection titles) and ES which are in the new Spanish Section! It was exciting to put together a core collection of books in Spanish with Ms. Wald and to see her students reading

Buscando a Alaska

on Engel Terrace. Thank you to Dr. Thomas who donated jazz and blues materials.

As always, if you need help finding something or think of something that you need, please ask me or Mrs. VanHorn.

700 H

Harrison, Charles, 1942-2009. An introduction to art. New Haven [Conn.] : Yale University Press, c2009. This original and inspiring book offers clear and wide-ranging introduction to the arts of painting and sculpture, to the principal artistic print media, and to the visual arts of modernism and post-modernism. Covering the entire history of art, from Paleolithic cave painting to contemporary art, it provides foundational guidance to the basic character and techniques of the different art forms, to the various genres of painting in the western tradition, and to the techniques of sculpture as they have been practiced over several millennia and across a wide range of cultures.

701.03 H

Helguera, Pablo. Education for socially engaged art : a materials and techniques handbook.

704.9 T

Living as form : socially engaged art from 1991-2011. 1st ed. New York : Creative Time Books ;, 2012. 'Living as Form' grew out of a major exhibition at Creative Time in New York City. Like the exhibition, the book is a landmark survey of more than 100 projects selected by a 30-person curatorial advisory team; each project is documented by a selection of color images.

709.04 K

Kwon, Miwon. One place after another : site-specific art and locational identity. Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, c2002. Site-specific art emerged in the late 1960s in reaction to the growing commodification of art and the prevailing ideals of art's autonomy and universality. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, as site-specific art intersected with land art, process art, performance art, conceptual art, installation art, institutional critique community-based art, and public art, its creators insisted on the inseparability of the work and its context. In recent years. however, the presumption of unrepeatability and immobility encapsulated in Richard Serra's famous dictum "to remove the work is to destroy the work" has been challenged by new models of site specificity and changes in institutional and market forces." "One Place after Another offers a critical history of site-specific art since the late 1960s and a theoretical framework for examining the rhetoric of aesthetic vanguardism and political progressivism associated with its many permutations. Informed by urban theory, postmodernist criticism in art and architecture, and debates concerning identity politics and the public sphere, the book addresses the siting of art as more than an artistic problem. It examines site specificity as a complex cipher of the unstable relationship between location and identity in the era of late capitalism. The book addresses the work of, among others, John Ahearn, Mark Dion, Andrea Fraser, Donald Judd, Renee Green, Susanne Lacy, Inigo Manglano-Ovalle, Richard Serra, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and Fred Wilson.

709.4 B

Bishop, Claire. Artificial hells : participatory art and the politics of spectatorship. London ; : Verso Books, 2012. Since the 1990s, critics and curators have broadly accepted the notion that participatory art is the ultimate political art: that by encouraging an audience to take part an artist can promote new emancipatory social relations. Around the world, the champions of this form of expression are numerous, ranging from art historians such as Grant Kester, curators such as Nicolas Bourriaud and Nato Thompson, to performance theorists such as Shannon Jackson. Artificial Hells is the first historical and theoretical overview of socially engaged participatory art, known in the US as "social practice." Claire Bishop follows the trajectory of twentieth-century art and examines key moments in the development of a participatory aesthetic. This itinerary takes in Futurism and Dada; the Situationist International; Happenings in Eastern Europe, Argentina and Paris; the 1970s Community Arts Movement; and the Artists Placement Group. It concludes with a discussion of long-term educational projects by contemporary artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn, Tania Bruguera, Pawel Althamer and Paul Chan.

781.643 C

Nothing but the blues : the music and the musicians. New York : Abbeville Press, c1993.

781.65 H

Havers, Richard, author. Uncompromising expression : Blue note, the finest in jazz since 1939. Purveyor of extraordinary jazz music and an arbiter of cool, Blue Note is the definitive jazz label--signing the best artists, pioneering the best recording techniques, and lead cover design trends with punchy, iconic artwork and typography that shaped the way we see the music itself. The roster of greats who cut indelible sides for the label include Miles Davis, Art Blakey, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Bud Powell, Ornette Coleman, Jimmy Smith, Norah Jones, and many more. Published for Blue Note's seventy-fifth anniversary, this landmark volume is the first official illustrated story of the label, from 1939 roots through its celebrated releases in the fifties and sixties to its renaissance today. Featuring classic album artwork, unseen contact sheets, rare ephemera from the Blue Note Archives, commentary from some of the biggest names in jazz today, and feature reviews of seventy-five key albums, this is the definitive book on the legendary label.

781.65 M

Motion, Tim. Jazz portraits : an eye for the sound : images of jazz and jazz musicians. New York : SMITHMARK, c1995.

808.83 C

Mothership : tales from afrofuturism and beyond. College Park, MD : Rosarium, c2013.

809.3 W

Womack, Ytasha. Afrofuturism : the world of black sci-fi and fantasy culture.

951 F

Fairbank, John King, 1907-1991. China : a new history. Enl. ed. Cambridge, Mass. : Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998.

CI 398.2 S

Song Shuhong. Drama Stories : Classic Stories of China. Beijing, China : China Intercontinental Press, 2011.

CI 495 F

Feng Lijuan. Chinese in Hand : Daily Chinese. Beijing, China : Confucius Institute, 2013.

CI 495 S

Shi Keyan. Chinese in Hand : Transportation Chinese. Beijing, China : Confucius Institute, 2013.

CI 641.3 L

Li Hong. Green Tea : Appreciating Chinese Tea. Beijing, China : China Intercontinental Press, 2009.

CI 641.3 P

Pan Wei. Oolong Tea : Appreciating Chinese Tea. Beijing, China : China Intercontinental Press, 2009.

CI 641.3 W

Wang Jidong. Pu-erh Tea : Appreciating Chinese Tea. Beijing, China : China Intercontinental Press, 2009.

CI DVD For

The Forbidden City : Twelve-episode Historical Documentary Series. Beijing, China : China Central Television and Palace Museum, 2008.

CI DVD Lea

Zhongguo cha yi : gen wo xue Zhongguo cha yi = China's art of enjoying tea : learn China's art of enjoying tea with me = Ch¿±goku no chagei. Beijing : Wai wen chu ban she, [2005]. This DVD introduces the origin of tea, tea sets and most sorts of tea with Chinese, English, and Japanese dialogue.

ES 976.4 C

Canion, Mira. Rebeldes de Tejas. Chandler, AZ : TPRS Publishing, 2009.

ES 92 Alou

Gaab, Carol. Felipe Alou : Desde los valles a las montañas. Chandler, AZ : TPRS Publishing, 2012.

ES 92 Kahlo

Placido, Kristy. Frida Kahlo. Chandler, AZ : TPRS Publishing, 2015.

ES F Ano

Anonymous. Vida y muerte en la Mara Salvatrucha. Chandler, AZ : TPRS Publishing.

ES F Bak

Baker, Katie. La Llorona de Mazatlán. Chandler, AZ : TPRS Publishing, 2013.

ES F Bla

Blasco, Melissa. Los Baker van a Perú. Chandler, AZ : TPRS Publishing, 2007.

ES F Can

Canion, Mira. Pirates : del Caribe y el mapa secreto. Chandler, AZ : TPRS Publishing, 2008.

ES F Col

Collins, Suzanne. En Llamas. Barcelona : RBA Libros, 2012.

ES F Col

Collins, Suzanne. Los Juegos del Hambre. Barcelona : RBA Libros, 2012.

ES F Col

Collins, Suzanne. Sinsajo. Barcelona : RBA Libros, 2012.

ES F Gaa

Gaab, Carol. Brandon Brown quiere un perro. Chandler, AZ : TPRS Publishing, 2013.

ES F Gaa

Gaab, Carol. El nuevo Houdini. Chandler, AZ : TPRS Publishing, 2010.

ES F Gaa

Gaab, Carol. Esperanza. Chandler, AZ : TPRS Publishing, 2011.

ES F Gaa

Gaab, Carol. Los Piratas del Caribe el Triangulo de las Bermudas. Chandler, AZ : TPRS Publishing, 2012.

ES F Gaa

Gaab, Carol. Problemas en Paraíso. Chandler, AZ : TPRS Publishing, 2010.

ES F Gre

Green, John. Bajo la Misma Estrella. New York, NY : Vintage Español, 2012.

ES F Gre

Green, John. Buscando a Alaska. Mexico : Castillo de la Lectura, 2014.

ES F Gre

Green, John. Cuidades de Papel. New York, NY : Vintage Español, 2014.

ES F Kir

Kirby, Nathaniel. La Guerra Sucia. Chandler, AZ : TPRS Publishing, 2011.

ES F Kir

Kirby, Nathaniel. La maldición de la cabeza reducida : Written by Spanish students from Pinelands Regional High School under the direction of Nathaniel Kirby. Chandler, AZ : TPRS Publishing, 2009.

ES F Pla

Placido, Kristy. Brandon Brown Versus Yucatán. Chandler, AZ : TPRS Publishing, 2013.

ES F Pla

Placido, Kristy. Noche de oro. Chandler, AZ : TPRS Publishing, 2014.

ES F Pla

Placido, Kristy. Robo en la noche. Chandler, AZ : TPRS Publishing, 2009.

ES F Row

Rowling, J. K. Harry Potter y el c©Łliz de fuego. 4th ed. Barcelona : Salamandra, c2001. Tras otro abominable verano con los Dursley, Harry se dispone a iniciar el cuarto curso en Hogwarts, la famosa escuela de magia y hechicer©Ưa.

ES F Row

Rowling, J. K. Harry Potter y el misterio del pr©Ưncipe. 1. ed. Barcelona : Salamandra, 2006. Sixth-year Hogwarts student Harry Potter gains valuable insights into the boy Voldemort once was, even as his own world is transformed by maturing friendships, schoolwork assistance from an unexpected source, and devastating losses.

ES F Row

Rowling, J. K. Harry Potter y el prisionero de Azkaban. 11a. ed. Barcelona : Salamandra, 2010, c2000. During his third year at Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry, Harry Potter must confront the devious and dangerous wizard responsible for his parents' deaths.

ES F Row

Rowling, J. K. Harry Potter : y la orden del F©♭nix. 1a. ed. Barcelona : Salamandra, 2004. As Harry faces his upcoming fifth year at Hogwarts Academy, there are increasing rumors of dark times coming and of Lord Voldemort's return to power, and a secret anti-Voldemort society, The Order of the Phoenix, begins meeting again.

ES F Row

Rowling, J. K., author. Harry Potter y la piedra filosofal. 1a edici©đn. Rescued from the outrageous neglect of his aunt and uncle, a young boy with a great destiny proves his worth while attending Hogwarts School for Wizards and Witches.

ES F Row

Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter y la camara secreta. Barcelona : Salamandra, 1999.

ES F Tot

Carrie Toth. La Calaca Alegre. Chandler, AZ : TPRS Publishing, 2013.

ES F Tot

Toth, Carrie. Bianca Nieves y Los 7 Toritos. Chandler, AZ : TPRS Publishing, 2015.

ES F Tot

Toth, Carrie. La Hija del Sastre. Chandler, AZ : TPRS Publishing, 2012.

ES F Pla

Placido, Kristy. Noches misteriosas en Granada. Chandler, AZ : TPRS Publishing, 2011.

[harlequinjae]

If I'm great yet have not love, I am nothing and useless

If I status update with such insight, hilarity, godliness, or profundity, that I get a thousand retweets and likes, yet have not love, I’m a cellphone that won’t stop ringing, or a car alarm at 2 AM. If I understand every nuance of every complicated doctrine, including eschatology and predestination, and am a constant defender of orthodoxy, and if I am renowned for my ability to communicate truth with passion, but have not love, I’m nothing more than a first grader in the kingdom of God. If I am a fantastic worship leader, able to lead hundreds of people in passionate worship of God, yet have not love, my skills are worth jack. If I am a blog warrior, constantly on the attack against those who would distort the faith, yet have not love, I’m that yippy dog next door who won’t stop barking… even at 3 AM. If I live a life of radical sacrifice, crazy love, and wartime mentality, and sponsor lots of kids through Compassion International, and go on mission trips in “closed countries,” but have not love, I gain nothing. If I am a great artist, able to capture a snapshot of the glory of God on canvas, or in song, or in prose, or on film, and yet have not love, my creative “genius” is utterly useless to God. If I preach like Piper or Chandler or Chan or Platt, and yet have not love, I’m nothing more than a squawking parrot who likes to imitate others. If I read all the books by all the smart theologians, and can quote them off the top of my head, yet have not love, WHO REALLY CARES!!!! Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. -- written by Stephen Altrogge of BibleStudyTools.com