Nepenthe

A DARKNESS is once again descending on JRR Tolkien’s fabled land of Middle-earth. An unfinished work completed by the writer’s son is such a departure from the world of hobbits that it may merit an X-certificate. The manuscript for The Children of Hurin, to be published next spring, contains incest, suicide and a multitude of violent deaths. Any film version is likely to have restricted audiences because of the subject matter. Christopher Tolkien has spent the past 30 years working on the epic tale that his father began in 1918 while on leave from the army. JRR, who was recovering from trench fever contracted during the battle of the Somme, later abandoned the work. Its publication 90 years on follows the success of The Lord of the Rings, which has sold more than 50m copies and was adapted into a trilogy of Oscar-winning films. The “new” work does not include characters such as Arwen, played by Liv Tyler in the movies directed by Peter Jackson, and Legolas, played by Orlando Bloom. It ...

'You probably think you know the story," says the sardonic voiceover at the start of Hoodwinked, as we see a leather-bound volume of classic fairy tales lying open at the legend of Little Red Riding Hood. The movie then dresses up this old granny of a fable in the vulpine comedy of post-Shrek, multilayered family entertainment, tailored to an audience fully aware that the word "hood" denotes not only a type of head-covering but also urban territory disputed by gangs. In this animated retelling, released on Friday, young Red turns out to be a tough, sussed type whose first words to the wolf are: "You again? What do I have to do? Get a restraining order?" The film's poster pastiches The Usual Suspects, and this hints at a narrative in which visual and verbal clues consistently mislead. None of the central characters - Red, Granny, the Wolf, the Woodsman - fulfils the same purpose as in the traditional nursery version, and the narrative variously sends up ...

Dante's Inferno: A Virtual Tour of Hell for once, do NOT skip intro

Father Sean (voice by Liam Neeson) : I was lying in the gutter picking up my teeth, St. Peter himself appeared before me. 'Sean, yah wanker,' he says, 'repent of your wicked ways or sod off!' Then he gobbed in my face and turned back into the streetlamp. Homer : Face it, Marge. Catholics rule! We got Boston, South America, the good part of Ireland, and we're makin' serious inroads in Mozambique, baby! Bart : This is a Catholic church. Chicks got no authority here. Marge : Homer, you've been gone all night—and you look like you accepted someone as your personal something. Were you at that Catholic Church? Homer : Look, I know I was supposed to yell at that priest, but he's so cool! He plays drums in a band with a bunch of other priests! Marge : I knew they'd try to convert you! That's what they do! Well, I'm not having another twelve kids. Homer : Marge, no one's saying twelve. Nine, ten, tops! (gets out a pamphlet entitled "Plop ...

When the cacophony of claims overwhelms, turn to these simple hints. In this media-heavy world, we are pelted with complex and often confusing nutrition messages almost daily. These bulletins come from the government, consumer groups, physicians' groups, dietitians and marketing teams for products making bold "healthful" claims. It often takes an interpreter to translate these messages into language we can all understand. Here is a list of small changes I have developed as a nutrition professor and writer. They can yield big results if we incorporate them into our daily routine. Reducing risk of disease - Use heart-healthy olive oil and canola oil in cooking. - Eat yogurt with active cultures to help boost your immune system. - Snack on nuts: They contain heart-healthy fats, vitamin E and minerals such as selenium and magnesium that are typically low in our diets. - Read food labels for sodium content; aim for no more than 2,400 milligrams a day. - Eat foods with dark c...

Can one be a conservative Christian and a Darwinian? Yes. Here's how. 1. Evolution fits well with good theology. Christians believe in an omniscient and omnipotent God. What difference does it make when God created the universe--10,000 years ago or 10,000,000,000 years ago? The glory of the creation commands reverence regardless of how many zeroes in the date. And what difference does it make how God created life--spoken word or natural forces? The grandeur of life's complexity elicits awe regardless of what creative processes were employed. Christians (indeed, all faiths) should embrace modern science for what it has done to reveal the magnificence of the divine in a depth and detail unmatched by ancient texts. Calling God a watchmaker is belittling. 2. Creationism is bad theology. The watchmaker God of intelligent-design creationism is delimited to being a garage tinkerer piecing together life out of available parts. This God is just a genetic engineer slightly more a...

Yes says Ray Connolly So now it's clear. The reason Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary were such unromantic flops is because both books were written by men. Big mistake. There was nothing wrong with the writers. They were good enough in their own ways. It's just that the balance of their chromosomes wasn't up to the job. If only Sadie Tolstoy or Sharon Flaubert had done the writing, instead of Leo and Gustave, the entire history of Western literature would have been completely different. And how do we know this? Because Daisy Goodwin, the presenter of Reader, I Married Him, a new BBC4 series on the novel, which will be transmitted this autumn, just about tells us so. "You can't have a really seriously romantic book written by a man," she says, dismissing in a sentence the murmuring hearts of half humankind. If you're a male writer, Daisy goes on, you lack insight into the ways of women. Oh dear! Presumably the converse is true, too, which explains why Emi...

Having a green pet needn't mean keeping frogs, you know. There's actually a lot you can do to reduce your pet's environmental pawprint. Let's start at the bottom: faeces. It's more of a problem than most people realise, especially if you live in a built-up area. More people means more pets, and the abundant concrete means more runoff, which gets washed into water courses and ponds, the bacteria that thrive on them starve ponds of oxygen and kill aquatic life. Cat faeces can also harbour nasty parasites such as toxoplasma gondii, which has even been known to survive sewage treatment and kill sea life. All of which means the best solution is not to let dogs or cats defecate where the poop can get into the drains. If you're a dog owner, you'll already know to bag it and bin it, but how about using biodegradable dog poop bags, made from corn starch, (biobags.co.uk) as a green alternative? There are green options for cat litter, too. Avoid the clay stuff: it swel...

At just three weeks old these kittens have already been reserved The world's first specially-bred hypoallergenic cats have gone on sale in the United States. US biotech firm Allerca says it has managed to selectively breed them by reducing a certain type of protein that triggers allergic reactions. The cats will not cause the red eyes, sneezing and even asthma that some cat allergy sufferers experience, except in the most acute cases. Despite costing $3,950 (£2,104), there is already a waiting list to get one. Allerca first started taking orders for hypoallergenic cats back in 2004. No genetic modification It tested huge numbers of cats trying to find the tiny fraction which do not carry the glycoprotein Fel d1 - contained in its saliva, fur and skin - which produces allergies. Those cats were then used to breed the hypoallergenic cats. The company's Steve May told the BBC that it is a natural, if time consuming m...

Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez compared George Bush to the Antichrist in a speech at the United Nations on Wednesday. "The devil came here yesterday, right here," he said. "It smells of sulfur still today, this table that I am now standing in front of." When did Satan start smelling like sulfur? About a century or two before the birth of Christ. Satan almost certainly gets his rotten scent from his underworld lair, described in the Book of Revelation as a " lake of burning sulfur ." Hell as such doesn't appear in the Old Testament, but the book of Genesis does recount how God " rained down burning sulfur on Sodom and Gomorrah ." The idea of a sulfurous Hell ruled by an archvillain called Satan seems to have arisen at some point in the period between when the two sacred texts were written—probably in the first or second centuries B.C. The Apocryphal Books of Enoch , for example, talk about a place of punishment with "rivers of fire...

Everything you know about British and Irish ancestry is wrong. Our ancestors were Basques, not Celts. The Celts were not wiped out by the Anglo-Saxons, in fact neither had much impact on the genetic stock of these islands The fact that the British and the Irish both live on islands gives them a misleading sense of security about their unique historical identities. But do we really know who we are, where we come from and what defines the nature of our genetic and cultural heritage? Who are and were the Scots, the Welsh, the Irish and the English? And did the English really crush a glorious Celtic heritage? Everyone has heard of Celts, Anglo-Saxons and Vikings. And most of us are familiar with the idea that the English are descended from Anglo-Saxons, who invaded eastern England after the Romans left, while most of the people in the rest of the British Isles derive from indigenous Celtic ancestors with a sprinkling of Viking blood around the fringes. Yet there is no agreement among h...

What if you knew for sure that the cute little baby burbling and smiling at you from his stroller in the park was going to grow up to be another Hitler, responsible for a global cataclysm and millions of deaths? Would you be justified in picking up a rock and bashing his adorable head in? Wouldn't you be morally depraved if you didn't? Or what if a mad scientist developed a poison so strong that two drops in the water supply would kill everyone in Chicago? And you could destroy the poison, but only by killing the scientist and 10 innocent family members? Should you do it? Or what if an international terrorist planted a nuclear bomb somewhere in Manhattan, set to go off in an hour and kill a million people. You've got him in custody, but he won't say where the bomb is. Is it moral to torture him until he gives up the information? Questions like these have been pondered and disputed since the invention of the college dorm, but rarely, until the past couple of weeks, unsto...

J ames Joyce's Ulysses has been hailed as a masterpiece since its publication in 1922. This tale of the adventures of advertising salesman Leopold Bloom on June 16, 1904, in Dublin is a remarkable conflation of mythology, symbolism, philosophy, social realism, and humanity. Bloom's relationships with wife Molly and surrogate son Stephan Dedalus reflect the simple decency of the common man. H owever, the common reader has been reluctant to face Joyce's great panorama. Laden with obscure references and dogged by an ever-growing body of secondary literature, the book's reputation as a "difficult" work has placed a barrier between the book and its potential audience. This is a shame, because Joyce was writing for a general readership, and his novel offers a remarkable experience even for the reader with no prior familiarity with Joyce's world. F rom Hunger smells an opportunity when we step in it. Herewith, our stripped-down, revved-up vers...

Few thirsts run deeper these days than the one for self-improvement, and few recent books have slaked it better than the ubiquitous bumble-bee-colored titles in the “For Dummies” series. Since it began in 1991 with “DOS for Dummies,” which helped computer neophytes navigate the user-unfriendly program that predated Windows, the series has swelled to more than 1,000 titles and sold more than 150 million copies. The list of Dummies topics is like a parallel history of contemporary consciousness. Lawn care, Mormonism, golf, women in the Bible, Excel, auto repair. Wedding planning, digital photography, sudoku, bathroom remodeling, senior dogs, Chinese cooking. Fighting spam, TiVo, Nascar , Catholicism, yoga with weights, Sarbanes-Oxley and living with Hepatitis C, not to mention forensics, ballet, adoption, overcoming anxiety, gluten-free living, kittens, baking, eBay timesaving techniques, knitting, C. S. Lewis and Narnia, teaching kids to spell, and even sex (explained by no less than ...

SkyCeilings TM and Luminous Virtual Windows TM are authentic illusions of nature that trigger relaxation and a sense of freedom, vitality, and well-being. Ok, then :)

Candida Höfer's photographs of libraries are sober and restrained – the atmosphere is disturbed by neither visitors nor users, especially as she forgoes any staging of the locations. The emptiness is imbued with substance by a subtle attention to colour, and the prevailing silence instilled with a metaphysical quality that gives voice to the objects, over and above the eloquence of the furnishings or the pathos of the architecture. This sumptuous volume contains Höfer’s famously ascetic images of the British Library in London, the Escorial in Spain, the Whitney Museum and the Pierpoint Library in New York, the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, the Villa Medici in Rome and the Hamburg University Library, among others. Umberto Eco introduces the collection with a witty reflection on the role of libraries in all our lives. Almost completely devoid of people, as is Höfer’s trademark, these pictures radiate a comforting serenity that is exceptional in contemporary photograp...

In the movie Fight Club , the character Tyler Durden (played by Brad Pitt) boards a bus and is confronted by an advertisement depicting a model's perfectly muscled fantasy male body, sculpted by pathological obsession and posed as if natural. "Is that what a real man is supposed to look like?" he asks. It's a common question, though not always a conscious one. Modern life takes place amidst a never-ending barrage of flesh on screens, pages, and billboards. These images convey assumptions about what is desirable in our physical selves while dispensing with reality. Because the media have been objectifying women for so long, researchers have had time to create a body of literature on the effects of these images on women. (In short, they make women feel worse about themselves, and often cause unhealthy behaviors.) But over the past two decades, the gender gap in media objectification has closed. Every bit as unattainable as Barbie-doll proportions and the heroin chic...