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When we started, and were playing in pubs, I wasn’t the singer … I was the drunk rhythm guitarist who wrote all these weird songs. We went through about five different singers – they were f***ing useless, basically. I always ended up thinking, ‘I could do better than this.’ … I mean, I hated my voice, but I didn’t hate it more than I hated everyone else’s voice … So I thought, 'If I can get away with that, I can be the singer.’ I’ve worked on that basis ever since.
Robert Smith of The Cure. I feel like this is a parable of something, but I’m not sure what.
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[gallery] fromwithinabook:
Last week these two book sculptures joined Byard Art’s Mixed Summer Exhibition, which continues until 13 Sep
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[gallery]
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the chief principles of Texas driving as I have inferred them in my 26 months of living in the Lone Star State
- At some point during the execution of a right turn, but always before your car is completely out of the road you have been driving on, be sure to come to a full stop.
- Merge onto interstate highways at a speed no greater than 35 miles per hour.
- Once on the interstate, if you are driving below the speed limit, make sure to stay in the far left lane and never leave it for any reason except to exit.
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Al helped himself to my fries as I chatted him up over a dinner of ‘ugly burger’ (double-decker burger and fried egg on toasted wheat). He told me about his stint with the Marines during World War II, and how he had watched the Enola Gay take off on its fateful flight to Hiroshima. I asked him what his secret to long life was. He said it was the wrong question. ‘I would recommend that you don’t live past 80,’ he said. ‘This 100 business is the worst.’
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The full significance - canonically, ecumenically and theologically - of Francis’s bold move will be picked over for a long time. But its real point is to bring healing. Many suffer hugely as result of abortion, but it is a silent suffering, that in contemporary society can barely ever be acknowledged. Those who have taken the lives of the unborn long to unburden themselves, to admit to their sorrow, confusion and regret, and to find healing. This is what the Church - God’s heart amid humanity - exists for: a battlefield hospital, ready to tend the wounds inflicted by contemporary mythology about individual sovereignty.Yet many are persuaded - by the strident voices asserting women’s “right” to abort - that the Catholic Church is a place of judgement and condemnation. If just some among these women in pain hear a different message - which given yesterday’s massive coverage is very likely - and if among those some take up this offer of liberation from guilt and a path back to God - which is also very likely - then Pope Francis’s grand gesture will have succeeded spectacularly.
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Dan K Norris creates alternative movie and TV posters. Via Tim Carmody on Twitter.
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The drama of ideas in which students got caught up owed its momentum to the peculiar, and in some respects paradoxical, gifts of the teacher. Although politics is inevitably about power — who has it and for what — he seemed happy to give away whatever power lay in his position as lecturer (he frequently offered the lectern to anyone who would propose a counter-position) and to rely only on the power of the better argument. Though bound, as a Dominican friar, to the disciplines of a religious order, he seemed to have the freest, most unfettered mind in the university. He delighted in argument and was fearless in provoking it, goading and teasing his listeners — usually in direct proportion to their complacency and cock-sureness. Still, the sharpness of his dialectical rapier never took away from his gentleness; he had no need to hurt. And while irony pervaded a great deal of what he said, he never seemed cynical. To the contrary, his thinking was generous, not only in the sympathy it brought to his chosen authors but also in the imaginative vistas it opened up; the sting most often lay in the dawning sense of how much less we are than what we might be.