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#prof deformation at this point
forsakenwitchery · 1 year
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So since the synopsis for 1x13 has a lot of people worried (me included) I wanted to point out some things that hopefully indicate they aren't backtracking with Tom?.. Tagging @walker-extended-universe and @laf-outloud ‘cause I’m quietly reading you guys and I don’t think I’ve seen people mention this.
Pic 1: I've spent the last week editing a vid with guys of WIndy and I've started paying A LOT of attention to their hats since I had to combine scenes, and I've noticed that in the flashbacks when Abby starts suspecting Shane, the killer wears a pretty specific hat with a textured/braided band (I believe it’s called band, not ribbon?). Know who else wears it? Shane when Abby first sees him in Independence. Granted, in all the scenes after that he wears a different one with a plain smooth one. But still, he IS the owner of the killer's hat. :D And by this time, I've spent enough time editing WIndy to know I've never seen such a hat on Tom (he appears to own one hat with like a smooth two-layered band of sorts). Plus, the killer as of 1x09 has those mimic wrinkles near the lips that Shane has and Tom doesn't (unless he's smiling, and the killer wasn't smiling).
Pic 2: Another interesting thing that I've noticed is that they've reshot this scene because the angle and the face under the hat look a bit different in the pilot and in 1x09. Notice how in the pilot we got more of a closeup shot where you can’t see much of the hat and the killer doesn’t look like Shane + in 1x09 there’s more blood on the hand (and I think the blood pattern on the sleeve is a bit different as well?). It’s a bit of a prof deformation as a cosplayer, but I just tend to look very closely at makeup, costumes, all that. I think this means two things:
1) When they were shooting the pilot, they didn't know if the show would be picked up and haven't cast anyone as Shane. 2) For them to go and reshoot part of that scene with Timothy to show it for all but 2 seconds seems like a hell of a lot of extra hassle if they planned on going back to "yeah, Tom did it, Shane is a red herring". What seems more likely to you guys, that they had spent all that extra time recreating the killing scene because they had nothing better to do or because they maaaaaybe plan on showing it with the killer’s face fully visible, so they had to reshoot it with the actual culprit’s face? I’m betting on the second one.
And now my two cents on some theories and discussions I’ve already seen flying around, putting them under the cut.
Someone left a comment on my latest Tabby vid the other day saying they think that even if Shane killed Liam, Tom should have still known Shane did it from the start, and ummmm no, that's easily debunked by Tom being surprised when he sees Shane has a gun now and literally asking him, “what is this, you carry a gun now?”. In a room with just the two of them, so there was no potential audience for him to play to & it makes no sense for Tom to know Shane is a killer before Abby came to tell him.
The thing I've also noticed with WIndy is how the writers love to plant small details early on and then building upon them later on. I was genuinely surprised by the sheer amount of those small details while editing, almost nothing in WIndy comes out of nowhere just because the plot suddenly demands it. Like for example when Kate jokingly guessed that Hoyt bunked at the undertaker, and then when they needed a Jane Doe, Hoyt knew the undertaker always had an unknown body to sell. Or how Kai saw Kate receive a telegram early on, and many more things like that. With that in mind, they've told us at least twice this season that Tom repeatedly got blamed for things Shane did, so to me that seems like a setup for something similar with Gus' attack/Liam's murder.
Plus at this point... it would make zero sense for Tom to end up being this big bad. He was willing to get beaten up to "make something" of the town, he stopped Calian's execution, he went into the dust storm to save a stranger etc etc. Those are all acts of someone who CARES. Like who's capable of caring, not a cold-blooded killer. Not some sociopathic mastermind, and Tom would freaking have to be a total sociopath to kill Liam, shoot Abby and all of the sudden hurt Gus. Time and time again he tried to help others and was reluctant to hurt others (even indirectly with forbidding the opium den) unless they hurt him (then straight to the torture barn they go). Still, in no universe him ending up as THE antagonist makes sense. He's not the good guy, he's got a long way to go, but THE bad guy? Doesn't sit well with me. I hope they don’t ruin all the amazing buildup they’ve done.
The episode title also bothers me a lot, idkkkk hopefully they're aware Tom is a fan favorite, so killing him off would be like shooting themselves in the foot. Even with fanvids I see how much people are interested in content with Tom specifically, so he's really THE character that can potentially get more people interested in watching the show. I love the whole cast and all the characters dearly, but Tom and Kate became my two absolute favorites, with Tom specifically we got this amazing morally grey character and I just can't imagine WIndy without him, pretty sure I'm not the only one. Backtracking with him at this point for pure shock value would just ruin... well, not everything, but a lot.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk. :D
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random-movie-ideas · 6 months
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Superman Concept Movie II
CLARK'S CHARACTER ARC
This next movie would function as a sequel to Superman: Son of Krypton, which I previously laid out a plot for. As such, it would also be a piece of a larger cinematic universe, and so, between this movie and that, we would have also seen Supergirl get her own standalone movie, separating her off to her own adventures. We would also have likely seen at least one Justice League movie, preferably one that resulted in catastrophic collateral damage, for the purposes of our character arc here. Let's begin:
Clark will start out on Earth, still acting as its protector even though Kara is off on her own adventures and the Kandorians have been relocated to a new planet by the Green Lantern Corps. He still maintains his close relationship with Lois Lane and his parents. (I believe I want to start working toward Lois and Clark's marriage somewhere around here, so an early scene could be a proposal or something; I say this because it makes sense for them to be married and expecting Jon Kent by the time of the third movie facing Doomsday). Either way, Clark is in a happy state, one way or another.
He will find himself attacked by a cyborg calling himself Metallo. Clark will fight against him, but will struggle, finding that Metallo's enhancements allow him to nearly mimic Clark's strength and abilities. Metallo will open his chest and reveal a chunk of Kryptonite at his heart, which will disable Clark and cause him to lose. Confident in his victory, Metallo will fly away.
Clark will return to his home and be patched up by his parents and Lois. Clark will express concern and frustration, that more Kryptonite exists on Earth, having believed Brainiac had the full collection. He fears that with that stuff around, he will no longer to protect the Earth that he loves. He comes to the conclusion that he needs to learn everything he can about the stuff and what he can do about it.
Despite the risks, he chooses to contact a scientist, Prof. Emil Hamilton, and seek his aid in understanding Kryptonite. Hamilton proves only too eager to help Superman, which Clark brushes off. He chooses to undergo experiments.
Working together for a while, Clark and Hamilton will test Kryptonite's effects using a chunk Clark had broken off during his fight with Metallo. Bombarding it with different types of energy temporarily changes its color, each one showing different effects (you could have a fun montage here, depending on the tone). Clark and the professor will examine the effects of each and devise counter-measures for them all. Clark will also bond with Hamilton, sharing with him why he fights as a hero, causing some guilt within Hamilton.
After a short while, Metallo will return. Clark will launch into battle against him, this time prepared against the stuff. After a brief fight, Clark will break open Metallo's chest piece and rip the chunk from it. Metallo will appear unfazed by his defeat, as Clark is blindsided by an attack from a much stronger foe.
Clark will turn to see a near-clone of himself, except bigger and a bit deformed, a Bizarro version of himself. The Bizarro will fight him, matching him perfectly in strength and speed, even outmatching him in it, and proving not only immune to Kryptonite, but seeming to get an energy boost from it. Lois, having been suspicious of Hamilton the moment Clark started working with him, tries to intervene and tell Clark that Hamilton had been stealing his DNA, that he had helped create Metallo and Bizarro. The fight ends with Bizarro grabbing Lois and flying away with her.
After healing from his injuries, Clark goes to Hamilton's lab in a rage, demanding to know where Lois is. He finds only Hamilton there, all his equipment cleared out. An argument ensues between them when Hamilton reveals that he was just trying to protect the Earth too. At this point, we'd call back to the fight with Brainiac of the first movie, and the devastation that happened in the previous Justice League, with Hamilton asking Clark what happens to humanity if someday he ever snaps. What chance would humanity have? So when he was contacted by a financier wanting to create a safeguard against Superman, he agreed to do it. He'd only come to regret his actions after coming to see the good man that Clark was. He finally tells him that the man behind all this is Lex Luthor.
Clark flies to Lexcorp, finding Lex Luthor there with Metallo and Bizarro (Lois might be still captive, or she might have already caused some trouble, haven't fleshed that out yet). A fight will ensue, with Clark using his knowledge that Bizarro's responses to Kryptonite will be reversed, and uses that against him. He will be about to kill Bizarro when Lois will stop him. Lex will look at him like he had justified every fear he had ever had about him. Clark will realize what Hamilton meant about the danger he poses.
I'm not quite sure how we go from here yet. I will flesh that out as I explore Lex, Metallo, and Bizarro's character arcs in turn. I feel that this being quite a ways in to a Cinematic Universe makes the themes a little shaky without the rest of the world fleshed out yet, but I do very much like a) truly exploring the aspects of Kryptonite and actively finding countermeasures against it, and b) the most interesting dynamics people like Lex Luthor and Emil Hamilton have with Superman is them recognizing the threat he would pose if he stopped being a hero, and taking measures of varying severity against him, and it's a moral quandary that doesn't have many great answers. On the one hand, you let Superman hang around, running the risk he will snap someday and kill everyone, but on the other hand, casting others out for fear of what they could do has always been the underlying trait of the worst of humanity. And so, I am abstaining from writing a conclusion to the arc for now, as nothing quite feels satisfying yet. (And, well, the third movie featuring Doomsday supplies a real conclusion to that question, so whatever answer here just kind of has to be a fill-in).
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indigozeal · 1 year
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On Twitter, writer and translator Ryo Morise speculates on possible Lovecraft inspirations: I just realized now that the twins from Clock Tower are probably taken from "The Dunwich Horror."  Given the Nameless Pagans thing, the circumstantial evidence is pitch-black.
"The Dunwich Horror" concerns two demonic twins—one humanoid but deformed, and murderous; the other, the real threat, a gigantic crawling mass with a human face secluded deep within the family residence. The twins are born into a family worshipping...well, this is Lovecraft, so it's the Old Ones instead of demons as with the Barrows, but six (six six) of one... In both cases, the mother is human, but the father is an otherworldly monstrosity: the Outer God Yog-Sothoth in "Dunwich"; the infernal Great Father in Clock Tower, at least in the novels.
Speaking of the novels: The Nameless Pagans is a fictitious book in Clock Tower's novelizations supposedly detailing the pagan faith followed by the murderous Barrows patriarch, as per this conversation between scholar of religion Prof. Sullivan and protagonist Helen Maxwell:
"A magnificent discovery, isn't it!"  The crest in the book featured a monster seated atop a skull  -  the exact image represented by the idol if viewed from the front.  "It seems that the Barrows family subscribed to a very peculiar faith.  Not Christianity, as you can imagine.   There's a book, The Nameless Pagans, that includes some speculation as to the nature of the heretic faith to which Theodore Barrows subscribed.  This Theodore was quite a learned man  -  he left behind four books he'd written!  And one of them in part touches upon what one could call the primitive religious consciousness of the Europeans  -  even if, well, I don't believe there was a sense of Europe as we now know it at the time.  Anyhow, they extrapolate from this what the nature of Theodore's beliefs were, and I found it a quite stimulating study!  It seems to support my own ideas on the subject."
"Your own ideas, Professor?"
"Indeed; it's one of the theses I'd like to complete before I die.  Its cornerstone rests on the primitive religious consciousness of the Europeans.  Basically, it concerns the nature of the faith that existed in Europe prior to the formation of the beliefs of the Celts.  This is my own hypothesis, but I believe that the original form of all the Indo-European faiths  -  and, indeed, perhaps, most faiths of the world -  can be found there."
Sullivan links this proto-faith to the sites of giant standing stones with religious significance scattered across Europe, an apparent inspiration from "The Call of Cthulhu" and its accounts of bloodthirsty faiths across the world with inexplicable points of commonality in their objects and manner of worship.  Sullivan goes on to argue that the more anti-social aspects of this primitive faith found later purchase among the Celts:
"Right you are!"  Sullivan clapped his hands together.  "And their faith was called Druidry for that very fact.  They seem to have achieved a measure of fame for their rites involving human sacrifices and their exceptional cruelty therein.  They would drown people by sealing them in barrels filled with water, cram several victims at once into giant human figures built out of wood and burn them alive  -  some truly horrible practices, I understand.  The Celts believed in an undying soul and conducted these services in search of rebirth in a higher form.   But if that's so, then why did they have to think up of ever more ways to inflict terror and suffering upon the victims of their sacrifices?   That's the question.  The Aztec civilization was famous for its sacrifices as well, but they would merely stab their victims in the heart to kill them... -  a rather quick procedure, compared to what the Druids did.  Why did the Celts adopt such practices, so cruel they were akin to torture?  I believe it was due to the influence of a far more ancient faith  -  the people of the faith of the giant stones, in other words.  So why did they offer up sacrifices using such cruel methods?   The answer is obvious: because that is what their god desired.  Death and terror, that is."
"So that's what the god that Theodore Barrows worshipped wanted as well."
Going back to the Dunwich brothers: the Dan equivalent is felled by a bolt of summoned lightning.  Kerosene, it seems, wouldn't have availed Jennifer in this case:
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Neither would have scrambling up that stone cliff:
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Damn these anticlimactic paragraph layouts.
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orthotv · 2 years
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alexninn · 4 years
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sfiddy · 4 years
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So Bad
For @academialynx , who made a donation to her local food bank in return for a fic!  This is a college AU, moderately prof/student (though the theme is that they DON’T break the rules) boatloads of yearning, and janky building maintenance that leads to getting locked in a closet.  She asked me to consider the Brandon Colbein song So Bad.  Which I did.  :)
Thank you, Dear!  Here we go!
Rated T
On AO3
On FF
On Tumblr!  (keep reading!)
Another champagne cork popped and a delighted cheer spread through the room.  Glasses, plastic cups, and hastily drained coffee mugs were refreshed and the party carried on.  Theirs was not a large music department, so to have attracted a fresh, exciting, multi-talented composition and collaborative piano specialist with a few international awards, one ‘early career’ grant and another from the National Endowment for the Arts meant their modest program was about to gain a little fresh clout at interdepartmental tenured faculty meetings.
“Congratulations again, Erik!”  Dr. Nadir Khan hauled Erik into a vigorous handshake and pumped for a full three seconds.  
Erik winced.  He’d be hamfisting the keys tomorrow if they kept this up.  “Thank you, Dean Khan.  It’s an honor to join as a full professor.”
“I am Nadir to you, and don’t forget it.”  Nadir refilled Erik’s plastic cup and tapped his department coffee mug against it, sloshing their champagne into frothy heads.  “It’s hard to believe it’s been five years, Erik!  You cost me a bet, I’ll have you know.  I didn’t think you’d stay after you had to teach that semester of History of Rock and Roll for non-majors.”
The lantern-jawed oboe professor laughed.  “Or the infamous Intro to Music Theory.”
“No, no,” disagreed Umbaldo Piangi, the portly voice teacher.  “When I went on sabbatical to Teatro La Fenice and you gave him The Chamber Music Outreach Project and graduate tutoring.  No warning!”  Even the big man’s clucking tongue was musical.  “But, Piangi is back, no?  I will cut back my performance hours and take back all the lessons and weekends and let Dr. Erik Devereaux return to his writing!”
“Actually,” Erik said, and the room stilled.  “The only part I disliked was the public part.  I never minded the private instruction.  If you would like to split the load, I’m happy to keep the instructional portion while you handle the tours, performances, and...outreach?”  He suppressed the grimace well enough.
Piangi, Italian down to his fine shoes, let out a whoop and grabbed Erik in a hug so tight it pressed his ribcage and nearly dislodged his delicate porcelain mask from it’s fine wire and leather fittings.
“Ah, my partner now!  I will call donors and show off the little tweeting songbirds with my lovely Carlotta while you teach them not to call for worms!  A toast!”  Piangi held up his plastic cup once again.  
Erik accepted a toast that crackled the edge of his plastic cup and hoped for something new and shiny to distract them.  Or for the lights to suddenly flicker and fail as they were prone to do, along with randomly closing doors in the terribly laid out office and work spaces.  The college had access to talent pipelines that the underfunded and neglected department had not been able to tap.  Their aggressive recruitment of him was a last ditch effort for change before the tiny group was relegated to a four piece for the university reagent’s cocktail brunch and a marching band for the far-better funded football team.
“To Dr. Devereaux!”
With a conspiratorial grin, Erik drained his cup and winked at Piangi.  “To the songbirds.”
Tenure in hand, Erik started his campaign.  Once he ditched the worst teaching credits to lecturers and adjuncts, he could focus on recruiting.  Specifically, to score a few respected but not-yet-headliner talents.  Emerging performers without a good gig had few options and the status and modest stipend to be a ‘visiting artist’ might be more attractive than the floating gulag of a cruise ship.  
A few excellent but relatively unknown performers could teach and perform, receive some finishing, and get quickly farmed out into the world.  The reputation-building move would be pricey, but no one gets paid dividends before investing.
His development grant would cover three such artists.  He got more than fifty applications.  Erik rubbed his eyes under the mask.  It was a good thing he never had plans-- it would be a long weekend.
The old music labs building had settled over the years and gained what the senior faculty referred to as ‘personality’.   Erik took this to mean ‘genially hazardous’.  No amount of facility requests or complaints brought the doors and keys division to do maintenance.
He was a quick learner though, and only got locked in his workroom twice before catching the door with his foot became second nature.   He even set a flaking brick, plucked from a neglected flower bed outside, in the corner by the door and kicked it against the frame as a doorstop.  Every time he came to his workroom, a narrow converted closet with a work bench and packed with shelves of manuscripts, music, errant repair kits and recording equipment, he would hit the outside light switch, unlock the door, step in, catch the door, then kick the brick.  
Switch, step, catch, kick.  His shoes were gaining new wear marks.
After kicking the brick into place, Erik opened his laptop and went over the last files.  He’d asked the department admins to strip out the audio files to just the audition pieces and remove identifying details from the fifty applications.  If he was going to invite talent, their first hurdle would be their musicianship.  Once he’d culled the herd to ten, he’d submitted his picks to the dean to select the three finalists.  Now they needed invitations.  Two vocalists and a classical guitarist made the cut and he spent the next few hours getting more acquainted with their files and ignoring the pings of his filling inbox.
At least it was just his inbox.  No one came to the music labs and his closet if they could help it.
If he was honest, no one came to meet him in person if they could help it.
Most performers were beautiful.  Entire websites and product lines were devoted to skincare for singers, makeup tutorials, look books and wardrobe consulting.  Erik’s particular variety of deformity would stand out in any circumstances, but in an entire department stuffed with the striking, stunning, and unconventionally glorious, he bordered on eyesore.  Even Piangi could command a room with his generous, rosy smiles and booming laugh.  
The mask was the best combination of memorable and functional he could muster.  Yes, surgery was an option but who signed up for years of unnecessary pain and the risk of infection?  He had better things to do.  
Like meet with his new visiting artists.  
The classical guitarist had supple wrists and forearms like Popeye.  His rolled cuffs drew the eye to the action while his cleverly knotted scarf kept you looking at his face, framed by artfully mussed hair.  
“We’re looking forward to your first concerts and hope you’ll consider collaborations with local programs.”
The baritone had a one in a million voice.  How he hadn’t been snapped up for opera yet was a mystery but Erik supposed it was his poor presence.  When you had the goods, you still had to sell them, and the young man’s love of neon, bad hair, and questionable repertoire (pin the tail on a Hal Leonard page) needed polish.  His work was shockingly precise and sounded like he had a cathedral in his mouth.
“Our faculty and staff are a rich resource for young performers and are always eager to assist.  We often work in parallel with the communications department and local professionals to prepare our artists for the culture and community as well as the stage.”
The soprano was the risk.  The recording had been largely boilerplate and her prior experience thin.  The reason she got in was a one-point-two second pause in her audition tape.  It was the silence that told Erik she had chops.  
Imagine, a soprano unafraid of silence.  It had been late in the weekend when he selected her and had not yet been able to examine the head shot.
“I… um...”
“Yes, Dr. Devereaux?”
“Welcome, Miss Daaé.”
The visiting artists would survey classes, provide demonstrations and guest lectures, and appear at university events, auditions, and generally get the word out that the department was shifting to a growth phase.  That was the official description.  Unofficially, there would be a mountain of effort to make each emerging artist a shot on goal for the department.  Recording deals, major and paid appearances, and successful auditions all counted toward the tally.  
Guitar was not Erik’s forte, and as much as he could contribute to the baritone’s look and polish, Erik had cultivated a far more… refined profile than the young man aspired to.  Erik maintained collars sharp enough to cut bread and a spotless sheen on his porcelain mask.  Right now, Dean Khan aspired to cut the young man’s mullet tail off.  
“Excellent, Miss Daaé, right on time.”  Erik slid the fall board up and they prepared to work.  She understood how to modulate her tone, how to select the emotional pitch to match the song, to contrast with it for effect.  She explored her range and willingly failed to find her borders.  It all made for an excellent student.
It was the quiet that made her breathtaking.  The anticipation of her.  Tenths of seconds that tightened the chest and made a quiver run through the blood.  Not often, only when it mattered, and only when it would matter enough to do so.  
When he could stand it no more, he asked her about it.
“I’m sorry, I can try to stop.”
“I didn’t ask you to stop, I asked when you started doing it.”
She considered him, her ribbons of curling hair twisting as she shifted.  “When my father was sick.  I could feel the need for silences because he couldn’t talk anymore.  It just felt… right.”
Erik nodded.  “Again.”
She’d been a late bloomer.  A ghost on the scene and at least five years older than the rest of the sopranos at her stage.  It also meant she hadn’t spent her entire high school and college career belting Broadway in the recital rooms, building nodes on her vocal chords.  
They finished late one night and he walked her to her car.  “So what did you do for practice?”
She pinked under the parking lot lights.  “I, um… waited tables at an Italian restaurant.  You know, where your server might sing opera when they bring you breadsticks?”
Erik nodded.  “Parmesan and Puccini?”
Bless her, she giggled.  “Bellinis and Bellini.  A few really knew when they were hearing but most just wanted to hear Nessun Dorma because they heard it on Youtube.  I managed to get a few singing jobs out of it but I mostly just waited tables.”  They stopped at her car but she hadn’t reached for her keys yet.  “I was a bartender and the second understudy for a Gilbert and Sullivan society when I saw your announcement.”
“Their loss,” Erik said.  He left off the second half.
“Thanks.”  Christine hesitated.  “I didn’t expect to be accepted, so… thanks.”  
Something changed in the breeze.  Something cool and soft in the night air mixed with the gold light pouring down from the lights.  It highlighted the curls that spiralled out of control around her neck as she tilted her head just so.  
It was just a moment, a funny thump that ricocheted in his chest at her upturned face, her soft smile.  Maybe her eyes flicked down, maybe her sharp inhale had a little catch in it.  Maybe it was the way her lip twitched, but a red flag suddenly waved in Erik’s head and he stepped back carefully.  He had a powerful fear of heat and burns.
“Yes, of course.  The, uh, department was very happy to offer the opportunity.”
She blinked.  “Of course.  Well, thanks for the great session and walking me to my car.  Have a nice evening, Erik.”
Christine drove away and Erik stood in the parking lot for some minutes after her taillights had faded.  He imagined it.  Surely, he’d taken a friendly conversation the wrong way.  She wasn’t his student, strictly speaking, but he had influence over her career, which would be just as bad.  
Besides, he had completely misread the whole thing.  Surely.  Women didn’t look up at him like that-- like he would kiss them.  After a walk after dark, telling him about themselves, and looking at him like that.
No one looked at him like... that.
Oh no.
She wasn’t strictly his student.  He was her mentor.  Even a brief thought made it obvious and completely inappropriate.  Did she think it would improve her opportunities?
Erik swallowed.  No, if that was the game she wouldn’t have backed off.  Surely he’d misread the situation.
They brewed tea together.  She remembered his favorite oolong.
He saw a cascade of curling hair on his way to the post office and his heart leapt.
It wasn’t her.  The disappointment was too confusing to examine.
His mouth went dry when her sweater slipped from her shoulder.  Then he knocked the music from the stand.
She smiled and helped him pick up the sheets.  
There were freckles on her shoulder.
... 
Five months into the visiting artist tour and Piangi had the concert hall packed for their first performances.  Franco the guitarist, who preferred just the one name, would play a twenty minute set, followed by the baritone Burton Armstrong, as baritoney a name as Erik had ever heard, then Christine, and finally Franco would play again with accompaniment.  
Erik was content to stay in a tiny box seat far to the side as Piangi introduced each performer.  Franco had gained the stage he deserved, and Burton had been convinced to get a proper haircut and suit, and sang a particularly impressive Russian ballad set.  
Christine was introduced and settled onto the stage.  She was radiant in dark blue, and decorated her baroque set with agility.  From his perch, Erik could as easily imagine her distributing bellinis as gracing an opera stage.  It was not an insult.  After her short set, she nodded and was joined by Burton.  A duet?  
She looked up and found him, up in his perch.  She nodded, and the two launched into a series of excerpts from Semele, Handel’s somewhat neglected tale of a torrid affair between a mortal woman and the god, Jupiter.
Their gazes met as she sang.
O Jove! In pity teach me which to choose,
Incline me to comply, or help me to refuse!
The baritone thundered.
Too well I read her meaning,
But must not understand her.
If Erik’s ears heard the rest of the concert, he could not recall it later.
Dean Khan adjourned the faculty meeting.  “Oh Erik, if you have a moment?”
They waited until the room was cleared and Nadir closed the door, then casually looked over the remaining pastries.  “Excellent concert last month.  The work with Burton is certainly paying off.”  
Erik leaned against the table.  “His socks were bright green, but we felt it was a workable compromise.”
“Franco is excellent in front of the crowd.  Has he met the flamenco dancers yet?”
“I put in a call.  I think he’s going to their weekly meeting next Thursday.”
“Marvelous.  Let me know how that goes when you hear, won’t you?”
“Of course.”  Erik felt his chest tighten the longer Nadir perused the snacks and chose to tear off the bandage himself.  “Anything else?”
“There is, in fact,” Nadir did not look up from the muffins.  “Christine’s performance was exceptional.  Truly filled with passion.”
Erik tried to take a sip of coffee but his cup was empty.  He faked it.  “She’s a wonderful artist.”
“Yes.  I couldn’t help but notice--” Nadir paused over the croissants, then passed them over to examine the cookies.  “You two seem to have a unique and strong mentor-trainee relationship.”
“Thank you.”  It had not been a question.  There was nothing here… yet.  “We work well together.”  
“I’m glad to hear that.  The program you’ve created is admirable for it’s transparency and integrity.”
“I agree.  Thank you for noticing.”
Nadir looked up with a slight nod, then selected a macadamia cookie.  “I’m sure the remaining six months will fly by, Erik.”
He had no idea how to respond.
...
Six months.  There were six months left in the visiting artist term.  There were more sessions, a mini tour, and a series of small concerts meant to showcase the new talent the department had ‘produced’.  
Six months of lies, pretending he was misunderstanding something.  Pretending he didn’t notice the way she was at his side and on his mind.  Then she would leave him to the dull, overworked life he’d made for himself in the hopes of making a name for himself while simultaneously avoiding attention.  More lies, but easier to swallow.  
Her voice came from the hallway.  “Erik?  I’m heating up some water, would you like tea?”
“Is it the one you brought?”
A light laugh.  Sparkling.  “Of course.”
He dropped his work and grabbed his cup.  “Be right there.”
A very successful fundraiser was wrapping up on the top floor of the performing arts center.  It had a view over the campus, the nice side, and the glow of downtown caught the streaking rain on the tall glass walls.  
The donors had been generous, delighted with the new features of the program and the willingness to be accessible.  Erik stayed to the side, avoiding the center of the room where Piangi and his wife Carlotta took up residence.  Nadir circulated the room, nudging him out from time to time for a refill and to participate.  When forced to do so, Erik sloshed some middling red wine into his glass and let himself slip into Christine’s gravity for a few minutes before drifting away again.  
He could feel her gaze.
The cocktail party was to end at eleven-thirty, and by then nearly all the guests had left.  The last ones were rushed  out and Piangi hurried to the bar.  
“Open season!” 
A quick crush to the bar and every open bottle was ‘liberated’ to the long-suffering exhibits.  Christine topped off her glass and passed the bottle to a fellow soprano, hardly twenty years old, and the two laughed and kicked off their heels.  Piangi and Burton laughed over an earlier flub and the cello player, finally able to pack his instrument and relax, demanded and received a full glass.
Erik tipped back a hearty, warm swallow and emerged from the hinterlands.
“Oh, hi Dr. Devereaux!  Did you just get here?” teased Carlotta.  “Your legend only grows the more you hide.”
“All part of my devious plan,” he conceded.  Christine’s giggle mingled with the laughs of her peers.  “If you’ll excuse me.  Piangi, brilliant as always.”
“Same to you, Erik!  We plan many parties now, no?”
Easing his way towards the mirth, Erik relaxed.  There were plenty of others around, and this was just the after party to a long dog and pony show.  Listen to the pretty songbirds and throw money at the program, invitation only.  They all deserved drinks after three hours of that.
Christine was plucking a pin from her hair.  She shook the curls loose.  “Hi Erik!  God, I’m so glad to see you.”
“Oh?”
She held up a bottle.  “Yeah, you need a refill.”  
It had been a long night.  These events could be tricky to navigate.  Sometimes there was politics, other times business rivals.  More often, donors expected special privilege and access in exchange for their checks, as if the last hundred years of progress meant nothing.  The way a few of them had looked at Erik, maybe it didn’t.  
He let her pour some white wine over the dregs of his red.  Improvised rosé.  “Everything go okay?”  
“Good enough.  I think I have some auditions, and some stuff nearby might open up for me.”
“That’s great.  Who with?”
A nice chorus.  A solid baroque group.  Both could springboard to bigger things.  A few bigger things were here.  
“What’s bigger?”  She asked, her eyes dark and soft.  
He had not meant to speak, and now he rushed his words.  “Things!  Choirs, operas.  There’s a few small opera troupes and there’s churches that need choral directors that know how to work with organ and piano.”
She sniggered.  “Organs.”  The other soprano dissolved into giggles.
Erik pulled out his phone.  Clearly neither was driving tonight.  He absently tallied up his glasses and admitted he wasn’t either.
“Do you play the organ, Erik?”
“Yes.”
Christine stepped closer and, on pure instinct, Erik put his arm around her as she turned her head to speak.
“Can I watch?”  
His collar was tight.  He pulled up the app and ordered a car.
They ran through the rain, more than sprinkled, less than soaked.  Plenty wet to shiver from the chill of the driver’s exuberant air conditioning, though.  Between giggles and poorly composed directions, they dropped off the other soprano who wobbled successfully to her door before their driver sped away.  Christine did not shift away to the other seat, but leaned into him, tucking herself against his side.  
The driver glanced in the rear view mirror, then looked away.
She was cool and smooth.  Her loosened curls had tightened from the wet and tickled his neck and brushed against his mask.  
Her hand on his thigh.  Erik said nothing.  If he was silent there was a kind of deniability, or denial at least, of what was happening.  If he could deny that her fingernails caught on the inner seam of his trousers, then she could deny that his hand was firmly planted at her waist, holding her close.
And if she could deny that, then she could also deny that her nose bumped his chin, her ragged breath loud in his ears.  And they could both deny that their lips grazed, a not-kiss somehow more intimate than if their lips moved and pulled at each other.  Like her singing, it was the pause that made your breath catch and your insides tug.
“What number?”
Dashboards lights reflected in her eyes.  “That one,” she said, and cautiously settled.  The driver pulled forward and Christine unbuckled.  
“Good night, Erik.  See you tomorrow.”
“Good night, Christine.”
The driver glanced in the rearview.  Erik looked down.  “Sorry.”
The driver shrugged.  
One more month.
He was hiding.  He’d been hiding for weeks; stopped looking for her, stopped even wondering where she was or if she was alone.  There was no way to be near her without the pretense of a piano that wouldn’t leave him shaking.  No way to think about her without wanting.
He was Erik, a composer, a conductor, performer, designer of auditory spaces and translator of music.  He was a collaborative pianist and vocal specialist.  He’d given everything to music and the service of it, the delivery of it.  He didn’t need this. He’d never had this.
No one ever offered.  So he’d found fulfillment elsewhere, until now.
Erik hunched over his work, safely tucked into his corner of the music labs building.  Between grading, senior thesis submissions, revisions to his own publications, and a request for a letter of recommendation, he could be plenty busy late into the night with no need for anyone to--
“Hello?  Erik?”
Erik snatched at his mask and settled it.  He’d been found.  Time to lie, except he can’t lie to her.
“Can I help you with something, Christine?”  He gathered a stack and stood.  She met him by his door.
“Well, yeah,” she paused, blocking his path momentarily before stepping aside.  “I need your signature on my visiting artist release.  And another on my endorsement for my new job.”
Erik hefted his armload to the work closet.  “I’m sure they look forward to meeting you.  Come on.”  He unlocked the door and held it open, then followed behind her, hitting the light switch with his elbow before catching the door on his foot, then he kicked the brick into place.  He had to hold the stack to keep it from spilling across the work table.
She handed him the forms.  Erik moved to a span of clean tabletop and started scanning the release form.  Government agency boilerplate to satisfy the grant was mixed with flowery language so no one would suspect they were anything but artists.  Yesterday Franco had brought Burton’s form-- yep, this was Christine’s.  So on and so forth.
Erik had just finished scratching out his signature when he heard a familiar scrape.
“Why on earth do you keep a-”
Click.
“--brick?”
Erik pressed the heel of his hand into his chin.  
“Are we… locked in?”
“Yes.”
“Oh.”  A faint rumble vibrated in the walls.  “I don’t suppose that was just… construction?”
Erik let out a mirthless laugh.  “There were storms brewing earlier.  Besides, does this building look like they work on it?”
“Not really.”
Another rumble, louder, and the light fixture jittered.  
Christine finally took a deep breath.  “Have you been avoiding me?”
“No!  Yes.  I don’t know.”  He touched his hairline, recapped a pen.  “We crossed a line.  I had to get back behind it and I couldn’t if we…”  His hands skated across the table top nervously.  
“Is this about being my mentor?”
Erik barked an ugly, bitter laugh.  “What else?  God, you just, out of nowhere, with your smiles, and the way you look at me, and sing to me, and the Semele…” Erik’s skin grew tight as he recalled the cocktail party.  He turned, face growing hot beneath the porcelain and his throat tightening.  He was a ruin.
“--and the touching and wanting and you’re… you’re just going to leave!  I’m a fucking idiot!”
On cue, an extended, throaty roar of thunder rattled the stone and brick until the bare bulb above could suffer no more.  With a loud pop, the narrow room went dark.  They both scuffled in the dark until they had hold of something sturdy.
“Erik?”
He was embarrassed.  He was frustrated.  “What.”
“You need to sign the other form.”
“Want to get away that bad?  Fine.”  He reached for a desk lamp and tried to turn it on.  He flipped the switch furiously.  The power was out.
“Here,” Christine held up her phone and lit the screen.  Her screensaver was… them? Beside a piano together?
Erik snatched a pen from the table and slashed his name.  “There.  Just search for facilities or call the university police.  They can unlock the door.”
“Erik, did you even look at it?”
“Why bother.”
She snorted at him.  “God, you’re so blind.”
“The lights were out.”
“Fine, you want to be a jerk, be one, but at least look at where I’m taking a job before you decide to walk.”
She lit up her phone once more and he glared at the page like it was staring at his mask.  He tracked the offer and terms until he reached the party names and…
“You took a job at… a middle school?  Here?”  He looked up into the dim light.  “You’re not leaving?”
“Meet the new grade six to eight choir director.  Go Scotties.  And now you have no direct influence over my career.”
Her screensaver dimmed, and before it went dark, Erik could make out a flash of their faces, turned to each other.  He wondered if Nadir had seen this moment, because they looked as passionate as lovers despite being feet apart.
The room went black again, and he could hear her moving.
“I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“That much has been apparent.  What do you know?”
She was close.  Close enough to feel the way she shifted the air.  “I know way too much about motif design, lyric phrasing--”
Closer.  “Go on.”  Her hips were near his. 
“Harmonic theory, vocals”
 “Can attest.”  Her fingertips were at his jawline, tracing his mask.  “I thought it would be cold.”
“It’s been on my face all day.  Early Romantic era competition and,” his voice scraped over gravel, “that I want you. So bad.”
Her kiss was her reply.  Erik’s hands flew around her as she pivoted to the table with him, dragging his mask upwards.  He gasped as cool air brushed his face, followed by light, curious fingertips and her hot mouth.  Erik knocked over the stack of papers and files with a satisfying splatter.
“Is that light over there?” she asked, dragging her lips from his.  “Around that cabinet door?”
“What?” he panted.  “I thought that was a panel.”
She pushed him off gently, peering up at the wall.  “Right there, see?”
Sure enough, there was a thin line of light.  It was a hidden door with a magnetic latch. 
“They can’t keep the regular door from locking you in but they put a trick door at the back?”  Erik complained as he climbed through awkwardly.  Very awkwardly.  Her lips were red and swollen.
“Let me grab my things and we can get out of here.”
Erik checked his watch.  “First, we’re turning in your forms.”
“It’s almost five!”
“We’ll make it if we run.”
Panting, they caught the dean just as he was packing up to leave.
“Erik, Christine?  Are you alright?  That was some storm we--”
Erik shoved the forms at him.  “Yep. Terrible storm.  Here.”
“Indeed, Erik.  Why, your hair is a mess and I’ve never seen your shirt untucked.”
“Big wind.  Yep.  Almost hit by lightning.  Here, time stamp?”
“Miss Daaé, you may want to adjust…”
“For God’s sake just take the stupid form so we can go!” Christine shouted.
Nadir laughed and scanned the forms.  “I don’t want to see you until Monday, Erik.  You better be late.”
He didn’t make it in until Wednesday.
...
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darkgunslinger · 4 years
Text
Adamantine Shield short (from Saving Zim)
Just a little taste @luckyrabbit1927 of what I promised - taken from a section of deleted chapter way waaaay back - of more Zim/Prof.M scenes. Why am I always so shy to post these? XD
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
He held his hands out. He wasn’t sure what else to do.
This wasn’t exactly in his repertoire of experiences.
Membrane had only turned away to grab some printed schematics and brood over them a moment, and there hadn’t been a single sound to draw his attention.
Perhaps Zim had seen an opportunity, or imagined one, and before he’d realized how erroneous it was, he’d crashed to the floor – his departure from the bed a regretful fall – and the thin line of IV tubing had crisscrossed over one arm and around his foot. The telemetry leads, having been stretched unceremoniously, pinged off one by one, causing the ECG to protest with alarms.
Zim struggled, tightening the tubing, and furthering his panic. Membrane, seeing the situation develop, paused for just a millisecond before approaching, and when he did, the creature’s panic intensified. In just one moment Zim had become a wild, terrified animal.
“Everything’s all right. You’ve got yourself tangled up.” But that one extra step seemed to trigger an even stronger reaction.  
Zim rolled onto his side, unable to steer himself vertically, the twisted tubes snagging against his arm and ankle. “Stay! Stay a-away!”
The professor watched the Irken’s tiring struggles. He acted as though he was in a snare.
What signals remained from the Irken’s vitals escalated into the dangerous zone. Warnings on the professor’s wristplate flared in response.
He didn’t understand why Zim was so terrified.
“I need to free you little one, if you just let me approach.” He took another step and stopped. Zim’s claws blindly jerked around to slash at the tubing. Goaded by the fear the tubes inspired, his aim was appalling. Long scratches of deeper green began to appear from slit skin. Unable to breathe above the barbs of panic, Zim tried to prop his right arm beneath him, but his hand slid, shiny with blood, and he went back down again.
The professor could not endure it. He closed the gap between them and was not dissuaded when Zim spent all of his breath to release a bone-chilling scream.
“There there now, I’m freeing you. It’s all right, hush, hush.” Quickly he loosened the tubing around his shivery leg and arm in the hopes that this would dissolve the Irken’s undue terror. His vitals were in the red, his blood pressure falling fast despite the aggressive speed of his heart rate.
He held his littleness to his chest, feeling every shake and shudder bully the frailness that remained. “Let’s do our breathing exercises, hmm? I think now is a good time as any. You remember what to do? Breathe in, deeply now, and feel how my chest moves. Hold it in a moment, and then let it out.”
He exaggerated his chest movements so that Zim would feel them in turn. His tiny body was ice cold, skin clammy with sick-sweat. Though his eyelids were open partway, the pink pupils were extremely dilated. Barely visible nostrils flared somewhat, but it seemed unlikely he’d even ‘switch on’ enough to remember to breathe.
“Everything’s okay.” The professor said, keeping the cadence of his voice soft and steady.
Zim’s claws clutched insensibly on his arm as if it were a ledge he meant to cling to. His eyes slowly began to focus, the deep magenta almost warming up. As much as the professor saw him coming back to himself, he did not rush or hurry him.
When he seemed better able to comprehend the situation, he looked about him, blinking. He watched the little creature’s antenna unfurl until it gradually straightened. For much of his panic, the one antenna had dangled from his head like a velvet shoelace.
Those large eyes, shimmery with undisclosed emotions, blinked again, and his pink pupils coasted around as if he was looking for a target: something that had triggered the antagonism. The only ghoul was the fear, shelved deeply inside. It was the same adulterated fear most animals showed when faced with something beyond their control and comparative safety.
The professor had once tried to treat a deer he’d encountered on the road late one June summer’s day when Dib had been attending school. It had clearly been hit by a car or truck, and had been left for dead. Its hind quarters had taken the main brunt of the collision, and its back legs were broken. Prof. Membrane coaxed it into the backseat of his car where it bleated and struggled. He wasn’t sure why he’d chosen to take responsibility for it. He supposed it was simply because he couldn’t just drive off and leave it there. He’d always taken the mantle of the world’s problems as his own, knowing he’d been gifted with foresight and intellect. What was the point of the gift if he didn’t apply it?
But alas, the deer did not survive. Like Zim’s wild nature, fear itself seemed to devour its mind along with its vestiges of life, and before he’d even managed to haul it onto a table with the help of his two co-workers, it had died, not of its injuries, but of terror.
It was why he had curtly let Zim go without argument after the ‘baloney’ incident. Quite recovered and eager to move on, Zim had hurried away without much afterthought or conversation, as if lingering any longer might trigger some trap or plot beset by the wiles of man. He had wanted Zim to choose his next step, but sadly, he had intervened when that next step was never chosen.
At least, unlike the deer, Zim could understand human language. He would watch the professor’s expressions, as if trying to guess the deeper intentions beneath the words.
One day he hoped Zim would come to trust him.
“It’s okay now. Nothing’s here to harm you.”
Claws ran frantically along the brittle bones of his legs and arms, as if he half believed the tubing to still be there. A caged beast, used to being bound, may have had similar reactions.
His troubled eyes tirelessly checking and rechecking everything, Zim assertively pushed himself from the man’s gentle hold and stood precariously on stick-like legs, his left leg failing to bend as if the joints had locked up.
“You need a break from this room, don’t you?” He knelt close and took his hand before the Irken had a chance to get dizzy and topple over. Without any telemetry leads, his vitals were now closed to him. He had to now rely on Zim’s body language alone. “You are not trapped here, little one.” He wanted to affirm, in case that was what was on the Irken’s mind, and why wouldn’t it be? He was largely under their control; it had to be this way in order to keep him on the road to recovery. Even so, being mostly confined to one room allowed one’s imagination to fill in the blanks.
Membrane wondered if all members of Zim’s race were this highly strung, and prone to stress.
The Irken’s worried eyes swept upwards to look at him, again trying to determine the lies or the truths.
He had not given the former soldier his prognosis yet. He’d been holding back on it, fearful that Zim may take it very hard, or shelve it, like he did with things he’d rather ignore. Dib himself was still trying come to terms with it. Once he was onboard, the professor would inform the patient as gently as he possibly could. But not telling him was making Zim wary. He knew his continual existence here, in one corner of the lab, weak and disseminated, spread wide his suspicions. It was very likely that Zim already knew. But admitting it was something else entirely and therein lay the problem.
The Irken’s continued quiet was abnormal in every sense. When he’d sat on a chair years before, recovering from his sausage deformation, he had posed every question, yelled every suspicion, and demanded and shook until he was able to work his brain and limbs enough to flee. Even then, he’d been much more vivid and brighter a character. This creature before him was full of fear, lungs lugging heavily through his chest wall, greyer skin slathered in sweat, eyes rimmed and wide, limbs and hands shaking constantly.
“Recuperation is vital. But! I can take you wherever you’d like to go. I’m here to look after you. It’s my sworn oath.” He looked for signs of recognition, of understanding.
The Irken took a loud swallow, his eyes dull with drugs and exhaustion. He stood there, head bowed, looking brittle and ancient. Every night spent here seemed to enlarge those wrinkles under his eyes. His skin wasn’t as grey as it had been since his circulation had improved, but the professor couldn’t seem able to get the skin as green as it used to be. What vital ingredient was missing? What did the poorly thing lack?
Maybe it wasn’t medicine at all.
Maybe it was just care and warmth that the little bug needed.
“Let me show you my favourite room.” He said, squeezing gently on Zim’s arm. “No tubes. No wires. How about it?” The Elite’s eyes, hazy and unfocused, as if he was unfastening himself from the world a little at a time, started to shimmer, and the tension inside softened beneath his touch. “Let’s lift you up.” 
He felt those bird bones as he picked him up, and then he sat him on the crook of his arm.
The invention room was tidy and spacious, with tables assembled down one side. A great ponderous machine stood at the back on a round podium beside several test dummies. The machine was oval in shape, with gadgets bristling down its sides like hedgehog spines. “I call it the Adamantine Shield.” He said proudly when he watched Zim turn his head towards it. He was clued up on technology and the intelligence behind it. He would have made a very good co-worker. “It’s just the prototype at the moment. It’s designed to withstand blasts from an outside energy source, be they physical projectiles or energy pulses. Let me demonstrate!”
Like a kid in a toyshop, he put Zim down on one of the chairs and approached the monolithic object. He tapped on a button, and it deposited a capsule. The capsule opened, revealing a pulsing blue strap. He extended it in his hands, revealing a thin metallic strip. This strip he placed along a wooden dummy’s shoulder. “It adheres to anything. Fabric. Skin. Armour. It automatically configures the body of whoever is wearing it, and once activated, it envelops them in a nigh-indestructible shield.”
Zim cocked his head, one eye slowly narrowing.
“I do apologize! I get my best ideas from you!” The professor was saying, instantly seeing the recognition form in the Irken’s dark reflective eyes and from the slant of his antenna. “Your PAK produces absorbent shielding upon activation! Taking from your life energy in order to maintain it! I have created one that feeds on the energy it absorbs! Making it infinitely better! Here, let me show you just how it works!”
He took a device from a drawer, one of those surgical lasers that only worked for short distances. He walked close to the dummy wearing the metallic strip, and hit the button on the surgical laser. At once a shield of rushing azure appeared, and the weak laser beam fizzled as if the bubble shield’s surface was corrosive. The dummy remained protected.
“Hey. Th-that’s pretty cool.” Zim croaked, antenna docking forwards. “Have you tried sh-shooting some m-missiles at it?”
“Everything! Nothing gets through. But it’s top secret. I do not want the government using this technology. They’d exploit it for nefarious purposes.”
“What do you need it f-for?” Zim’s voice was a thin weedy rasp.
“I want it for my son in case he takes space exploration seriously. It’s completely harmless, only serving to protect the user. I do not endorse weapons, or anything that will encourage violence. My gift is to help others: the world, if necessary, even when humanity is set to destroy it.”
“W-Why?” He rasped.
“Because Earth is my home, as it is yours, little one. You may try to disagree with me, but you know it to be true. I hope that you’ll see the good here, and in every living thing. For a heart is a heavy burden.”
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The black hole always chirps twice: Scientists find clues to decipher the shape of black holes A team of gravitational-wave scientists led by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav) reveal that when two black holes collide and merge, the remnant black hole ‘chirps’ not once, but multiple times, emitting gravitational waves—intense ripples in the fabric space and time—that inform us about its shape. The study has been published in Communications Physics. Black holes are one the most fascinating objects in the Universe. At their surface, known as the ‘event horizon’, gravity is so strong that not even light can escape from them. Usually, black holes are quiet, silent creatures that swallow anything getting too close to them; however, when two black holes collide and merge together, they produce one of the most catastrophic events in Universe: in a fraction of a second, a highly-deformed black hole is born and releases tremendous amounts of energy as it settles to its final form. This phenomenon gives astronomers a unique chance to observe rapidly changing black holes and explore gravity in its most extreme form. Although colliding black holes do not produce light, astronomers can observe the detected gravitational waves—ripples in the fabric of space and time—that bounce off them. Scientists speculate that, after a collision, the behaviour of the remnant black hole is key to understanding gravity and should be encoded in the emitted gravitational waves. In the article published in Communications Physics (Nature), a team of scientists led by OzGrav alumnus Prof. Juan Calderón Bustillo—now ‘La Caixa Junior Leader - Marie Curie Fellow’ at the Galician Institute for High Energy Physics (Santiago de Compostela, Spain)—has revealed how gravitational waves encode the shape of merging black holes as they settle to their final form. Graduate student and co-author Christopher Evans from the Georgia Institute of Technology (USA) says: ‘We performed simulations of black-hole collisions using supercomputers and then compared the rapidly changing shape of the remnant black hole to the gravitational waves it emits. We discovered that these signals are far more rich and complex than commonly thought, allowing us to learn more about the vastly changing shape of the final black hole’. The gravitational waves from colliding black holes are very simple signals known as ‘chirps’. As the two black holes approach each other, they emit a signal of increasing frequency and amplitude that indicates the speed and radius of the orbit. According to Prof. Calderón Bustillo, ‘the pitch and amplitude of the signal increases as the two black holes approach faster and faster. After the collision, the final remnant black hole emits a signal with a constant pitch and decaying amplitude—like the sound of a bell being struck’. This principle is consistent with all gravitational-wave observations so far, when studying the collision from the top. However, the study found something completely different happens if the collision is observed from the ‘equator’ of the final black hole. 'When we observed black holes from their equator, we found that the final black hole emits a more complex signal, with a pitch that goes up and down a few times before it dies,’ explains Prof. Calderón Bustillo. ‘In other words, the black hole actually chirps several times.’ The team discovered that this is related to the shape of the final black hole, which acts like a kind of gravitational-wave lighthouse: ‘When the two original, ‘parent’ black holes are of different sizes, the final black hole initially looks like a chestnut, with a cusp on one side and a wider, smoother back on the other,’ says Bustillo. ‘It turns out that the black hole emits more intense gravitational waves through its most curved regions, which are those surrounding its cusp. This is because the remnant black hole is also spinning and its cusp and back repeatedly point to all observers, producing multiple chirps.’ Co-author Prof. Pablo Laguna, former chair of the School of Physics at Georgia Tech and now Professor at University of Texas at Austin, pointed out ‘while a relation between the gravitational waves and the behaviour of the final black hole has been long conjectured, our study provides the first explicit example of this kind of relation’. TOP IMAGE....Black hole cusp. Credit: ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery CENTRE IMAGE....The stages of a black hole merger. First, both black holes orbit each other, slowly approaching, during the inspiral stage.. Second the two black holes merge, forming a distorted black hole. Finally, the black hole reaches its final form. b: Frequency of the gravitational-wave signals observed from the top of the collision (leftmost) and from various positions on its equator (rest) as a function of time. The first signal shows the typical “chirping” signal, in which the frequency raises as a function of time. The other three show that, after the collision (at t=0) the frequency drops and rises again, producing a second “chirp”. Credit: C. Evans, J. Calderón Bustillo LOWER IMAGE....Detail of the shape of the remnant black hole after a black hole collision, with a ‘chestnut shape’. Regions of strong gravitational-wave emission (in yellow) cluster near its cusp. This black hole spins making the cusp point to all observers around it. Credit: C. Evans, J. Calderón Bustillo
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chiseler · 4 years
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The Head -- It Just Won’t Stay Dead
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In the early 1960s, the overwhelming majority of European horror films imported to the United States were either British or Italian, the British films being easily understood and the Italian ones frequently pretending to be of British origin. Examples of French horror were rare (odd for a country whose cinema was so rooted in the fantastique), reaching an early apex with Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face (1960), which came to the US in a well-done English dub called The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus during the Halloween season of 1962.
Seldom paid much attention in retrospectives of this fertile period in continental horror cinema is a rare German example, Die Nackte und der Satan (“The Naked and the Devil,” 1959), which came to the US retitled The Head almost exactly one year before the arrival of the Franju masterpiece. Critics like to refer to The Head as “odd” and “atmospheric,” words that seem to disregard deeper consideration, never really coming to terms with it as anything but a sleazy shock trifle. However, it was in fact the product of a remarkable and rarely equaled concentration of accomplished patrimonies.
Consider this: The Head starred the great Swiss actor Michel Simon, renowned for his roles in Jean Renoir’s La Chienne and Boudu Saved From Drowning; it was directed by the Russian-born Victor Trivas, returning to his adopted homeland for the first time since directing Niemandsland (1932, aka No Man’s Land or Hell On Earth), a potent anti-war statement that was all but obliterated off the face of the earth by the Nazis when he fled the country, and who furthermore had written the story upon which Orson Welles’ The Stranger (1946) was based; it was photographed by Georg Krause, whose numerous international credits include Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (1957); its sets were designed by Hermann Warm, the genius responsible for such German Expressionist masterpieces as Robert Weine’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919), Fritz Lang’s Destiny (1921), as well as Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) and Vampyr (1932), and its score is a wild patchwork of library tracks by Willy Mattes, the Erwin Lehn Orchestra, and a group of avant garde musicians known as Lasry-Baschet, who would subsequently lend their eerie, ethereal music to Jean Cocteau’s The Testament of Orpheus (1960). If all this were not enough, The Head was also filmed at the Munich studios of Arnold Richter, the co-founder of the Arri Group, innovators of the famous Arriflex cameras and lenses.  
Though made after the 1957 horror breakthroughs made in Britain and Italy (Terence Fisher’s The Curse of Frankenstein, and I vampiri, co-directed by Riccardo Freda and Mario Bava), The Head represented a virtual revolutionary act in postwar Germany, where horror was then considered a genre to avoid. The project was proposed to Trivas by a young film producer named Wolfgang C. Hartwig, head of Munich’s Rapid-Film, whose claim to fame was initiating a niche of exploitation cinema known as Sittenfilme – literally “moral movies” – which, like many American exploitation films of the 1930s, maintained a higher, judgmental moral tone while telling the stories of people who slipped into lives of vice (prostitution, blackmail, drug addiction), their sordid experiences always leading them to a happy or at least bittersweet outcome. Though it goes quite a bit further than either Britain or Italy had yet gone in terms of sexualizing horror, The Head nevertheless checked all the boxes required for Sittenfilme and was undertaken by Hartwig in early 1959 as Rapid-Film’s most prestigious production to date.
After the main titles are spelled out over an undulating nocturnal fog, the story begins with a lurker’s shadow passing along outside the gated property of Prof. Dr. Abel. With its round head and wide-brimmed hat, it looks like the planet Saturn from the neck up. When this marauder pauses to pay some gentle attention to a passing tortoise, we get our first look at the film’s real star - Horst Frank, just thirty at the time, his clammy asexual aura topped off with prematurely graying hair and large triangular eyebrows that seem carried over from the days of German Expressionism. More bizarre still, he later gives his name as Dr. Ood, whose explanation is still more bizarre: at the age of three months old, he was orphaned, the sole survivor of a cataclysmic shipwreck .
“That was the name of the wrecked ship,” he explains. “S.S. Ood.”
The ambiguous Ood takes cover as another late night visitor comes calling: a hunchbacked woman wearing a nurse’s habit as outsized as an oxygen tent. This is Sister Irene Sanders (the screen debut of Karin Kernke, later seen in the Edgar Wallace krimi The Terrible People, 1960). Though Irene cuts a figure as ambiguous and unusual as any Franju ever filmed, she owes her greatest debt to Jane Adams’ hunchbacked Nina in Erle C. Kenton’s House of Dracula (1945). As with Nina, Irene lives in the hope that her deformity can be eradicated by the skill of a brilliant surgeon.
When Irene leaves after meeting with Dr. Abel, Ood presents himself with the written recommendation of a colleague he previously, supposedly, assisted. A burly old walrus of a man, Abel (Michel Simon) already has two younger associates, Dr. Walter Burke (Kurt Müller-Graf, “a first class surgeon”) and the handsome, muscular Burt Jaeger (Helmut Schmid), who hasn’t been quite the same since an unexplained brain operation. Both associates share a creative streak; Burke is also “an excellent architect, [who] designed this house,” while Jaeger “designed my special operating table; it allows me to work without assistants.” (So why does he have two of them? With names that sound the same, no less!) Given the high caliber of Hermann Warm’s talent as a production designer, Burke and Burt together are every bit as skilled in architecture as was Boris Karloff’s Hjalmar Poelzig in Edgar G. Ulmer’s The Black Cat (1934). The main floor of Abel’s sprawling house is dominated by a vast spiral stairwell, striking low-backed furniture, a mobile of dancing palette shapes, and an overpowering wall reproducing Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Virtuvian Man.” Down in the lab, Burt’s robotic surgical assistant looks as if it might have been conceived by the brain responsible for the Sadean mind control device in Jess Franco’s The Diabolical Dr. Z (1965) - a film that, along with Franco’s earlier The Awful Dr. Orlof (1962), seems considerably more indebted to Trivas on renewed acquaintance than to Franju. The film was shot in black-and-white and at no point inside Abel’s abode do the silvery, ivory surfaces admit even the possibility of pigment.
Adding to its effect, the music heard whenever the film cuts back to Abel’s place is anything but homey. It consists of a single, sustained electric keyboard chord played in a nightmarish loop that seems to chill and vibrate, its predictable arc punctuated now and again with icy spikes of cornet. Though I don’t recall reading any extensive discussion of the film’s music, The Head represents what is surely the most important advance in electronic music in the wake of Louis & Bebe Barron’s work on Forbidden Planet (1956). Though the film’s music credits list bandleader Willy Mattes, Jacques Lasry and the Edwin Lehr Orchestra with its music, the most important musical credit is displaced. Further down the screen is the unexplained “Sound Structure, Lasry-Baschet.”
Lasry-Baschet was a musical combination of two partnerships – that of brothers Francois and Bernard Baschet, and the husband-and-wife team of Jacques and Yvonne Lasry. The two brothers were musicians who played astonishing instruments of their own invention, like the Crystal Baschet (played with moistened fingers on glass rods), the Aluminum Piano, the Inflatable Guitar, the Rotating Whistler, and the Polytonal Percussion. The Lasry couple, originally a pianist and organist, began performing with the Baschets on their unique devices in the mid 1950s. Some of the music they produced during this period is collected on the albums Sonata Exotique (credited to Structures for Sound, covering the years 1957-1959) and Structures For Sound (credited to the Baschet Brothers alone, 1963), a vinyl release by the Museum of Modern Art. These and other recorded works can be found on YouTube, as well; they are deeply moving ambient journeys but I cannot say with certainty that they include any of the music from The Head. That said, the music they do collect is very much in its macabre character and would have also fit very well into Last Year At Marienbad (1961) or any of Franju’s remarkable films.
When Ood meets with Abel and expresses his keen interest in experimental research, the good doctor mentions that he has had success copying “the recent Russian surgery” that succeeded in keeping the severed head of a dog alive – however, his moral code prevents him from taking such experimentation still further. After leaving Abel, Ood finds his way to the Tam-Tam Club, a nightspot where a life-sized placard promotes the nightly performances of “Tam-Tam Super Sex Star Lilly.” This visit initiates a parallel storyline involving Lilly (Christiane Maybach), who supplements her striptease work as an artist’s model, and is the particular muse of the brooding Paul Lerner (Dieter Eppler), a man of only artistic ambition, much to the annoyance of his father, a prominent judge who wants him to study law. Maybach reportedly won her role the day before she began filming. According to news reports of the day, the actress originally cast – the voluptuous redhead Kai Fischer – had signed on to play the part, after which producer Hartwig decided she must also appear nude. Fisher sued Hartwig for breach of contract in March 1959 and he was sentenced to pay out a compensatory fee of DM 4,000 – in currency today, the equivalent of about $35,000. As it happens, Christiane Maybach doesn’t appear nude in the film’s final cut either.    
The English version of The Head opens with a credit sequence played out over a shot of the full moon taken from near the climax of the picture. Unusually, the German Die Nackte und der Satan doesn’t present its title onscreen until Lilly is ready to go on. It’s superimposed with inverted commas on pleated velvet curtains that suddenly rise, revealing a stage adorned by a single suit of armor. Lilly dances out, stage right, garbed in a medieval conical hat, scarves, a bikini and a black mask, performing her dance of the seven veils around the impervious man of metal. She only strips down to her bikini but her dance ends with her in the arms of the armor we assumed empty, which tightly embraces her as its visor pops open, revealing a man’s face wearing skull makeup. Lilly screams, the lights go out, and the house goes wild with applause – a veritable blueprint for the striptease of Estella Blain’s Miss Death in Franco’s The Diabolical Dr. Z (1965).
The music heard during the film’s Tam-Tam Club sequences was recorded by the  Erwin Lehn Orchestra, evidently with Jacques Lasry on piano, though its emphasis on brass is its outstanding characteristic. Erwin Lehn was a German jazz musician and composer who established the first German Big Band Orchestra for South German Radio. Brass was a major component of his sound – indeed, he made pop instrumental recordings credited to The Erwin Lehn Beat-Brass. You can find their album Beat Flames on YouTube, as well.
Backstage, the beautiful Lilly is a nagging brat, drinking and flirting with patrons while berating Paul’s lax ambitions on the side. Dieter Eppler, a frequent player in the Edgar Wallace krimis and also the lead bloodsucker in Roberto Mauri’s Italian Slaughter of the Vampires (1964), makes for inspired casting; he looks like a beefier, if less dynamic Kirk Douglas at a time when Vincente Minnelli’s Lust For Life (1956) would have still been in the minds of audiences.
Once Ood joins the payroll, Dr. Abel confesses that his heart is failing rapidly. The only means of saving himself and perpetuating his brilliant research is by doing the impossible – that is, transplanting the heart from a donor’s body into his own, which he insists is possible given his innovation of “Serum X.” What Abel could not foresee was that his own body would die during the procedure. Ood tells Burke that the only way to save Abel’s genius is to keep his head artificially alive, which his associate rejects uncatagorically, pushing Ood over the edge into murder. Then Ood proceeds with the operation,  working solo with Jaeger’s robo-assistant passing along surgical tools as he needs them. When Abel revives, Ood breaks his news of the procedure gently by holding up a mirror and exclaiming that he’d had “one last chance – to perform the dog operation on your head!” Abel screams in revulsion of what he has become. The conciliatory Ood gently cautions him, “Too much emotion can be extremely dangerous now.”
The severed head apparatus is a simple yet ingenious effect, shot entirely in-camera and credited to Theo Nischwitz. It utilizes what is generally known as a Schufftan shot, a technique made famous by spfx shots achieved by Eugen Schufftan for Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1926). Essentially, Michel Simon was seated behind a pane of mirrored glass with all the apparatus seen from his neck up. The silvering on the reverse portion of the mirror was scraped away, allowing the camera to see through to Simon and the apparatus while reflecting the apparatus arrayed below his neck, in position for the camera to capture its reflection simultaneously. In at least one promotional photo issued for the film, Simon’s shoulders can be transparently glimpsed where they should not be.
Irene returns to meet with Dr. Abel and is surprised to find new employee Ood now alone and ruling the roost. When he offers to perform her operation himself, she instinctively distrusts and fears him – but is reassured after hearing Abel’s disembodied voice on the house’s sophisticated intercom.
After the killing and burial of Burke, whose body Bert Jaeger later finds thanks to the barking of Dr. Abel’s kenneled hounds (a detail that one imagines inspired Franju’s use of a kennel in Eyes Without a Face), the film introduces the dull but nevertheless compulsory police investigation, headed by Paul Dahlke as Police Commissioner Sturm. Sagging interest is buoyed by a surprise twist: when Dr. Ood returns to the Tam-Tam Club and asks the perpetually pissy Lilly to dance, he refers to her in passing as “Stella,” prompting her to recognize him as “Dr. Brandt” (the scorecard now reads Burke, Bert and Brandt), who has inside knowledge pertaining to her poisoning of her husband! Given that his  earlier writing projects include Orson Welles’ The Stranger and the bizarre Mexican-made Buster Keaton item Boom In the Moon (also 1946), in which an innocent shipwrecked sailor is rescued from his castaway existence only to find himself confused with a serial killer, Victor Trivas would seem partial to characters who live double lives.
Though Ood/Brandt’s aura is basically asexual through the first half of the film, the second half requires him to take an earthier interest in the female bodies finding their way into his hands. He takes the already tipsy Lilly/Stella home for a drink and some mischief.
“What’s in the glass?”
“Drink it and find out.”
“I hope it’s not poisoned.”
“That’s not my specialty, is it?”
Lilly/Stella becomes the necessary auto parts for Irene’s pending operation. In a nicely done montage, the film dissolves from Lilly’s unconscious body to a glint of light off the edge of Ood’s poised scalpel. It cuts to a curt zoom into Abel’s scream at being forced to watch a procedure he abhors, then a dissolve from his mouth to the spinning dials of a wall clock, followed by some time-lapse photography of cumulous clouds unfurling from an open sky, before Irene awakens in her recovery room with a decorative choker around her throat. She is able to gain her feet and covers her nude body in a sheet. She finds Ood lounging in Abel’s old office. He walks toward her as the sheet tumbles off her bare shoulders.
“How do you feel?” he asks.
“Well, I… I’ve a strange kind of feeling, as if my whole body were changed, as if my body didn’t want to do what I wished.”
Therefore, Ood has not only taken away her deformity but her responsibility for her actions, as well. Though she has never smoked before, she craves a cigarette. As Ood lights one for her,  her wrap falls further, undraping her entire bare back and thus exposing a birthmark on her left shoulder blade that becomes an important plot point. Ood confesses she’s been unconscious for 117 days, during which time he has passed the time by performing numerous enhancing procedures on her inert body. When he compliments her superb figure, she self-consciously covers her legs and recoils from him.
“Why run from everything you desire?” he asks. “You can’t run from yourself.”
He draws Irene into a surprising deep kiss, which – to her own apparent horror - she returns. Ood then tries to take things further but she refuses. After a brief (and surprisingly curtailed) attempt at abduction, he releases Irene, who dresses in a black cocktail dress and heels left behind by Lilly and returns to the humble apartment she kept in her previous life, where a full-length mirror stands covered. In a scene considerably shortened by the US version, she rips the cover away in a movement evocative of a symbolic self-rape, and glories in her new reflection.  The score turns torrid, brassy, and trashy as she admires her shapely terrain, fondling the curves of her breasts and hips in a prelude to a gratifying personal striptease. She then goes to her bed, where she tries on an old pair of slippers; she laughs and kicks them away, delighted at how small her feet now are. When she wakes the next morning, she finds a pamphlet for the Tam-Tam Club in Lilly’s old purse, which leads her body back to its former place of employ. When she arrives, another striptease artist is working onstage with a bed. This performance appears to burlesque Irene’s own motions from the night before; she kicks off one of her shoes as Irene had done.  
From the moment she walks into the club, still wearing Lilly’s clinging black dress, Irene evokes a black widow, a kind of Alraune – the femme fatale of Hanns Heinz Ewers’ novel, filmed in 1930 with Brigitte Helm and in 1952 by Hildegarde Knef. Like Alraune, she’s the beautiful creation of a mad scientist’s laboratory, but unnatural. In this case, she’s not really a soulless artificial being out to destroy men; on the contrary, she is soulful, starving for some insight into who she is, what she is. In this way, she particularly foreshadows Christina, the schizophrenic subject of Baron Frankenstein’s “soul transplant” played by Susan Denberg in Terence Fisher’s Frankenstein Created Woman (1966).
She quickly attracts Paul’s artist’s eye, just as the now-topless dancer onstage swirls into a swoon on a prop bed – unconsciously mimicking Lilly at the only time she ever saw her, when Ood gave her a sneak peek at the unconscious woman on his living room couch. She asks about Lilly, whom Paul mentions has been dead now for three months, her body (in fact, Irene’s former body) found maimed beyond recognition on some railroad tracks. He asks her to dance, but Irene refuses, as she has never danced, never been asked to dance before. But he insists and they both discover that she can: “You must be a born dancer!”
Beautiful and irresponsible, she allows herself to follow Paul back to his studio, where drawings of Lilly are displayed. Paul asks to draw her, and when she turns her back to bare her shoulders, he recognizes Lilly’s beauty mark. She flees from the apartment and confronts the unflappable Ood.
“You must have grafted her skin on my body!”
In the movie’s most hilarious line, he fires back, “You have a poor imagination!”
She rejects his true account of the procedure and demands to see Dr. Abel, so Ood takes her down to the lab for a personal confirmation from the man himself. Ashamed to be seen this way, Abel pleads with Irene to disconnect him from the apparatus. She is driven away before she can accomplish this, and tries to shut away the horror of the truth that’s been revealed by losing herself in her new relationship with Paul – but the old question arises: Does he love her for her body or her mind? There seems to be one answer when he first kisses her, and another and his lips venture further down her front.  
I should leave some things to be discovered by your own viewing of the film, but it demands to be mentioned that Irene – the triumphant climax of Ood’s genius, so to speak – actually survives at the end of the film to live happily ever after. Think about this. This is something that would have been considered unacceptable in any of Hammer’s Frankenstein films at the time – indeed, through the following decade. So, although Ood is ultimately destroyed (you’ll need to see it to find out how), the mad science he propounds is actually borne out. It’s left up to Paul and Irene, as they walk off together toward a new tomorrow, how they will manage to live with the fact that the two of them are in fact a ménage à trois. Will they keep the details of her existence a secret? Will medical science remain ignorant? Should they ever have any, what will they tell their kids?  
The Head was hardly the first word on severed heads in horror entertainment. In his own admiring coverage of the film, Euro Gothic author Jonathan Rigby likens the film to the story of Rene Berton’s 1928 Grand Guignol play L’Homme qui à tue la mort (“The Man Who Killed Death”): “There, Professor Fargus revived the guillotined head of a supposed murderer and the prosecutor lost his mind when the head continued to plead his innocence.” Earlier such films would include Universal’s Inner Sanctum thriller Strange Confession (1945, in which a never-seen severed head is a main plot point), The Man Without a Body (1957) and The Thing That Couldn’t Die (1958), the latter two proving that the concept was actually trending at the time The Head was made. Also parenthetically relevant would be She Demons (1958), which involves the nasty experiments of a renegade Nazi scientist living on an uncharted tropical island, who removes the “beauty glands” of native girls to periodically restore his wife’s good looks. Though The Head wasn’t the first of its kind, many of the traits it introduced would surface in similar films that followed – not only in Franju’s Eyes Without A Face or Franco’s The Awful Dr. Orlof and The Diabolical Dr. Z, but also in Anton Giulio Majano’s Italian Atom Age Vampire (1960), Chano Urueta’s The Living Head (1963), and most conspicuously in Joseph Green’s The Brain That Wouldn’t Die, not released until 1962 though filmed in 1959, some six months after The Head.
It must be mentioned that the film’s unusual quality did not go unrecognized by its American distributor. Trans-Lux Distributing Corporation advertised the film that took a most unusual approach to selling a horror picture. The ads did not promise blood, or that your companion would jump into your lap, or shock after shock after shock. Instead, Trans-Lux promised that “At The Head of All Masterpieces of Horror [my italics] That You’ve Ever Seen… You Must Place… The Head.”
Of course it was an overstatement, but the size of its overstatement would seem to have narrowed appreciably with time.
So why has The Head, with its rich pooling of so much European talent, been so neglected?
A key reason may be that horror fans like their actors and directors to maintain a certain consistency, a certain fidelity to the genre. Horst Frank (who died in 1999) would appear in other horror films, but never again played a lead; he pursued his career as a character actor and singer, maintaining a career on the stage and keeping close to home, never making films off the continent or appearing in productions originating from England or America. After The Head, Victor Trivas made no more horror films. The other four features he made had been produced a quarter century earlier and the majority are impossible to see in English countries. Those who remembered him for Niemandsland would have considered The Head an embarrassment, an unfortunate last act. It wasn’t quite a last act, however. The following year, he returned to America, where he sold his final script to the Warner Bros. television series The Roaring 20s, starring Dorothy Provine. Though the show avoided fantasy subjects, it was a voodoo-themed episode entitled “The Fifth Pin,” directed by Robert Spaar and televised during the series’ first season on April 8, 1961. The guest stars included John Dehner, Rex Reason, Patricia O’Neal and, surprisingly, beloved Roger Corman repertory player Dick Miller. Trivas died in New York City in 1970, at the age of 73.
The English version of The Head is considered to be a public domain title and has been available from Alpha Video, Sinister Cinema and other PD sources. This version was modestly recut to create a new main title sequence and to remove certain erotic elements unwelcome to its target audience in 1961. Happily, a hybrid edition – which, in a fitting fate, grafts the English dub onto the original uncut version from Germany – was recently made available for viewing on YouTube.
In the immediate wake of The Head, producer Wolf C. Hartwig pushed another erotic horror film into production, Ein Töter hing in Netz (“A Corpse Hangs in the Web,” 1960). Scripted and directed by Fritz Böttger, the film (Böttger’s last as a director) was first released in America as It’s Hot In Paradise (1962), sold as a girlie picture with absolutely no indication of its horror content. It was later reissued in 1965 as Horrors of Spider Island (1965). Under any of its titles, the film is notably lacking all of the artistic and aesthetic pedigree that made its predecessor so special and, indeed, influential.
Sixty years further on, The Head warrants fuller recognition as a spearhead of that magic moment on the threshold of the 1960s when so-called “art cinema” began to be fused with so-called “trash cinema,” leading to a broader, wilder, more adult fantastique.  
by Tim Lucas
[1] Victor Trivas’ Niemandsland may be viewed online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-4XhNMWoyw
[2] Rapid-Film’s later successes would include the German film that was subsequently converted into Francis Ford Coppola’s directorial debut (The Bellboy and the Playgirls, 1962), Ernst Hofbauer’s Schoolgirl Report film series (1970-80), and Sam Peckinpah’s Cross of Iron (1977).
[3] You can see Lasry-Baschet perform and be interviewed in a French newsreel from January 1961 on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awaFd6gArLg&t=46s.
[4] Well, as “recent” as 1940, when footage of a supposedly successful Soviet resuscitation of a dog’s severed head was included in the grisly 20m documentary Experiments In the Revival of Organisms. The operation was performed (and repeated) by Doctors Sergei Brukhonenko and Boris Levinskovsky, making use of their “autojektor,” an artificial heart/lung machine not unlike the contraption seen in The Head. A close look at Experiments reveals that it really shows nothing that could not have been faked through means of special effects. (When George Bernard Shaw learned of the Soviet experiment, he’s said to have remarked, “"I am tempted to have my own head cut off so that I can continue to dictate plays and books without being bothered by illness, without having to dress and undress, without having to eat, without having anything else to do other than to produce masterpieces of dramatic art and literature.") Experiments In The Revival of Organisms has been uploaded to YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ap1co5ZZHYE.
[5] Rigby, Jonathan. Euro Horror: Classics of Continental Horror Cinema (London: Signum Books, 2017), p. 79.
[6] Joseph Green also worked in motion picture distribution and later formed Joseph Green Pictures, which specialized in spicy imported pictures, some from Germany. It’s possible that he saw the Trivas picture when it was still seeking distribution in the States. When Ostalgica Film released The Head on DVD in Germany under its Belgian reissue title Des Satans nackte Sklavin (“The Devil’s Naked Slave”), the disc included The Brain That Wouldn’t Die as a bonus co-feature.
[7] A fine quality homemade experiment, it runs 91 minutes 47 seconds and can be found at: The Head (Die Nackte und der Satan) 1959 Sci-Fi / Horror HQ version!.
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kurtty-drabbles · 4 years
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The Omen (part 5)
N/A: A small intermission to show Mephisto doing something.
@djinmer4 @dannybagpipesarecalling @bamfoftheundead
Mephisto is a Demon Lord by title, but, lately, the Demon feels as if his power is in peril and needs to take serious measures to secure his place in the Hells(plural, but, everyone knows, with great sadness and envy, that Limbo is the official New Hell ruled by Belasco) and it will be soon when Belasco will eliminate the others Demons Lords in his master´s order or...for fun.
Mephisto is planning. Plotting and scheming and has an idea, one that´s so vile and horrible he never used before...until now. "Bring me, Enchantress, I have a request for her" Mephisto orders to his minions who look deformed goats in the most cartoonish way.
A small reward Zaorva gave to him for his good service in helping...a lady get birth safely, somehow, Mephisto believes this reward was a mockery on the other hand...he won´t complain with his boss.
The cartoonish deformed goats did what was asked. Do they really obey him or is just a trick from Zaorva? Again, better not question too much nor complain.
Amora arrives naked as usual and is not frightened in the least by Mephisto. "Does the devil wants me for the night?" Enchantress inquires amused as Mephisto shakes his head bemused and she finally summons some clothes.
"Once you saved Thor´s life by owning me a favour...I´m here to collect" Mephisto utters the magic words as now Amora is completely serious. "Remember that last resort plan? I´ll need it"
Amora does not slander said idea. Only replies. "You´ll need a woman who can handle such birth...a regular woman, even a regular mutant...won´t survive"
"I´m aware...who can carry my spawn?"
"I know someone. A woman named Raven Darkholme. She has her own plans and a grudge against Azazel, you have a sweet tongue sure you can persuade her to spend the night" she now has a flirty tone. "However, once the child is born...not even you can interfere"
"And..what if there´s another who can sire me a child?"
"Well, since you asked so nicely...there´s one last candidate, in case of plan A does not work"
______________________________________________________________________
Dr Strange is at the present moment working with Courtney Ross, Prof X, Mr Fantastic, Victor Doom (funny story, no one asked for his input, but Domm invites himself anyway) and now...Thor is here.
"So...the Antichrist is born already, do we know his name?" Prof X asked already dreading the answer. Courtney shakes her head slowly and this makes the point across to everyone.
Doom contributes to the conversation. "It means the Antichrist has the advantage...what do you suggest ?" Doom is looking at Mr Fantastic and does not let him speak. "I suggest we attract his attention. The antichrist has a lot of demonic energy in his presence we can detect if we use the right seal" and looks smug as people are taking his idea seriously.
Courtney intervenes. "Those seals will cause big havoc to each place we put them" and narrow her eyes "and we don´t trust a man named Doom to put a basically put scans seals in every part of the globe" Courtney concludes and Prof X agrees (even though he has Cerebro)
"Then who can put the seals?"
"I can do it" Thor manifest for the first time. "my brother Loki knows magic, but, what he does not know is that I know some as well and Amora taught me too"
No one can distrust Thor. So, Thor and not Doom will put the scans seals.
"Once putting the seals...what we´ll do?"
"Test the boy to see if there´s an iota of good in his soul...if he can really be saved, otherwise" Dr Strange is pragmatic to a tee and Thor is not sure if this is a good thing or not.
_____________________________________________________________________
Meanwhile, Michael Darkholme is waiting. Always waiting. Sometimes...there´s a part of him who whisper to him to stop waiting and do what he wants now, but, no, Michael sticks with the devil he knows and continues to wait.
"Son...look at me, please" Raven pleads and Michael nows that is all about manipulating the right person.
"You didn´t come to see me for the past days"
"Mom is working to make sure nothing bad happens to you, Mommy loves you" there´s a tone of unhinged here and Michael can feel it.
"Is ok mommy" Michael said hugging her now. "I forgive you"
Manipulation is all about saying the right words for the right person at the right moment.
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"So...Raven put you in detention just for that?" Marrow asked somewhat bored with Kitty´s story. "Lame, really lame"
Kitty rolls her eyes. "Yeah, really lame...why we can´t leave the detention again?"
Marrow now rolls her eyes at Kitty. "Scarlet Witch is the one dealing with detention...she cast a spell ...even if she´s not here if we leave she´ll know and the blue lady will get crankier"
Kitty bites her lips and asked. "Marrow, if I could take us out of here...could you help me to get my cellphone back?"
Marrow arch one eyebrow at her for a moment and then shurgs. "If you can take us out of here without alerting the famous Scarlet Witch ...sure, I´ll help get your pink cellphone back"
5 minutes later, Marrow is asking Kitty who they managed to past through Scarlet Witch´s seals. And Kitty, feeling a pun coming at her way, is faster for once. "This kitten got claws"
And Marrow fulfils her end of the deal by getting Kitty´s cellphone back. A bit of blackmail to Rogue works wonder ("Does your mother knows about a certain cajun?" "...what do you want Marrow?" "My pink cellphone, please. A pretty girl like me can´t be without a cellphone" "fine, but you better be quiet about the cajun" "who?")
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elajyoti-blog · 5 years
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Best Surrogacy Doctor in Bangalore | Dr. Bharathi Rajanna | Elawoman
Best Surrogacy Doctor in Bangalore
What is surrogacy?
Surrogacy is the place a lady winds up pregnant with the aim of giving over the child to another person in the wake of conceiving an offspring. By and large, she conveys the baby for a couple or parent who can't imagine a baby themselves - they are known as "proposed guardians".
There are two types of surrogacy. In traditional surrogacy, the surrogate mother's egg is utilized, making her the hereditary mother. In gestational surrogacy, the egg is given by the proposed mother or a contributor. The egg is treated through in vitro preparation (IVF) and after that set inside the surrogate mother.
Is surrogacy legitimate?
It changes from nation to nation.
Nations, for example, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Bulgaria restrict all types of surrogacy.
In nations including the UK, Ireland, Denmark and Belgium, Best Surrogacy Doctor in Bangalore is permitted where the surrogate mother isn't paid, or paid for sensible costs. Paying the mother an expense (known as business surrogacy) is disallowed.
Business surrogacy is legitimate in some US states, and nations including India, Russia and Ukraine.
Individuals who need to be guardians may travel to another country if their nation of origin does not permit surrogacy, or on the off chance that they can't locate a surrogate.
In any case, even here, the laws may change. For instance, some Australian states have condemned setting off to another nation for business surrogacy, while others grant it.
Where do individuals go for surrogacy?
Specialists state that nations prominent with guardians for surrogacy courses of action are the US, India, Thailand, Ukraine, and Russia.
Mexico, Nepal, Poland, and Georgia are likewise among the nations portrayed as conceivable outcomes for surrogacy courses of action.
Expenses change fundamentally from nation to nation, and furthermore, rely upon the quantity of IVF cycles required, and whether medical coverage is required.
What are the confusions?
There are no internationally perceived laws for surrogacy, such huge numbers of guardians and kids can be left helpless - or even stateless.
It can take a while to take a surrogate baby back to the guardians' nation of origin, as they may not be naturally perceived as the legitimate guardians.
"In Thailand, surrogates are viewed as the lawful mother, so if the guardians leave the baby with the mother, she is legitimately mindful. This is one of the troubles found in the Gammy case," Ms Scott says.
"In India, the planned guardians are viewed as the legitimate guardians," while under UK law, the surrogate mother is perceived as the lawful mother. This implies a surrogate baby conceived in India, for UK guardians, is brought into the world stateless and needs to apply for British citizenship."
Contingent upon the guardians' legitimate status in their nation of origin, things can likewise end up troublesome if the couple split up, Paul Beaumont, a Professor of EU and Private International Law at the University of Aberdeen, and writer of the book International Surrogacy Arrangements say.
"There can be an unjustifiable preferred standpoint in a care debate. The dad will regularly have parental rights, as the person who provided the sperm, though, as a rule, the egg hosts been given by a third gathering contributor... so the mother may not be viewed as the parent of the tyke," Prof Beaumont says.
Are there dangers for surrogate moms?
Prof Beaumont contends that guideline is likewise expected to guarantee that "centers are legitimately directed and moms are enough redressed, given appropriate social insurance, and legitimately consenting".
The guideline would likewise guarantee that "the expecting guardians are viewed as appropriate to be guardians in their nation of origin", he includes.
Without a guideline, one potential hazard for some, surrogate moms is that "if the child is brought into the world with some sort of deformity, the aiming guardians could desert the
Despite the fact that it is hard to get hard proof of misuse, it is likewise conceivable that similar to any possibly worthwhile industry, surrogacy could be available to manhandle, with ladies compelled to go about as surrogate moms for profiteers, Prof Beaumont says.
Dr. Archana Agarwal
Dr. Archana Agarwal is a gynecologist and infertility pro in Bangalore with more than two many years of experience. She finished her MBBS in 1991 from MLB Medical College, Jhansi and DGO in 1997 from ICMCH, Kolkata. She is a conspicuous individual from Karnataka Medical Council, Indian Fertility Society (IFS), Indian Society for Assisted Reproduction (ISAR) and European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology (ESHRE). Dr. Archana Agarwal got the Global Business Service Excellence Awards by Primetime Media in 2014. Dr. Archana has practical experience in gynecology medicines like In Vitro preparation (IVF), Donor Insemination Surrogacy, Endometrial Biopsy, Laparoscopy, Hysterectomy and Egg Donor administrations.
Dr. Vijaykumar PK
Dr. Vijaykumar PK is an IVF Specialist rehearsing at Caree Fertility Center and Vardhan Fertility and Laparoscopy Center. Dr. Vijayakumar P.K. finished MBBS from Vijayanagar Institute of Medical Sciences in 1996. At that point, he proceeded to seek after MD in Obstetrics and Gynecology from G S Medical College, KEM Hospital, Mumbai in 2002 and FNB from Institute of conceptive drug, Kolkata Diplomatic National Board in 2004. He has practical experience in Infertility assessment, IUI, IVF, Antenatal consideration and Gynecology Laparoscopy.
Dr. Bharathi Rajanna
Dr. Bharathi Rajanna is an IVF master and Gynecologist in Bangalore. She did her MBBS from the celebrated Kempegowda Institute of Medical Sciences, Bangalore in the time of 1987. She got a MD in Obstetrics and Gynecology in 1991 from Bangalore Medical College. She is likewise MRCOG Part – I qualified. She has inside and out learning about the issues and medications identified with Infertility, Obstetrics and Gynecology. She has been in the field for over two decades and has renowned participations from the Indian Medical Association (IMA), World Association of Laparoscopy Surgeons, and Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, London (RCOG). She spends significant time in Intra-Uterine Insemination (IUI), Cervical Cerclage, Andrology, Laparoscopic Surgery and Infertility Evaluation/Treatment
Dr. Asha S Vijay
Dr. Asha S Vijay is a standout amongst the most top of the line and set up infertility pros and gynecologists in India. She has more than one and half many years of involvement in the field of gynecology and infertility strength. Dr. Asha finished MBBS and DGO from Bangalore Medical College and Research Institute in 1992 and 1996 individually. She additionally sought after DNB from Kempegowda Institute of Medical Sciences (KIMS) in Bangalore. Dr. Asha is a famous individual from Bangalore Society of Obstetrics and Gynecology and Federation of Obstetric and Gynecological Societies of India (FOGSI). She is right now giving gynecology and infertility treatment administrations like In Vitro preparation (IVF), Intrauterine insemination (IUI), Microsurgical Epididymal Sperm Aspiration (MESA), Advanced Laparoscopic Surgery and Egg and Sperm gift and solidifying offices. Dr. Asha S Vijay heads different parts of Garbhagudi IVF Center at various areas in Bangalore
Dr. Ashalatha Ganesh
Dr. Ashalatha Ganesh is a prestigious IVF pro and obstetrician who is right now rehearsing at Wellspring Mother and Child Care Hospital. She has sought after MBBS and afterward begun her training. She gives the best infertility and gynecology related medications like High-hazard pregnancy care, Normal Vaginal Delivery (NVD), In Vitro Fertilization (IVF), Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection (ICSI) and Intrauterine Insemination (IUI) systems. Dr. Ashalatha has increased impressive involvement in the field of infertility and regenerative prescription. She has effectively gained a wide scope of involvement in treating patients with infertility and gynecology issues.
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roytohisma1977-blog · 5 years
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In the process of coming up with a lesson plan, my boss about I have been watching a lot of Jenna old videos at work. My boss has never heard of Jenna until I brought her up. It been so fun to watch my boss see these old Jenna videos for the first time!. The first Creed was OK. The second was lousy.Thursday saw the long awaited announcement of a release date for Space Jam 2 starring LeBron James. James admitted to thinking about making a Space Jam sequel the time as long as six years ago, he has appeared as himself and as a Yeti on the big screen, and, most importantly, he is LeBron James. Obviously unpopular opinion: This is a syllabus, which is provided on day one of class and allows any prospective student ample time to register w/ a different prof if they take issue with the policy. He drops the lowest grade (the probability of two events barring a student from making an exam is extremely low). He even suggests that a student drop the course if they think there will be any issues with the policy.. Pat the meat dry then put salt on the meat and leave it in the fridge for about 2 hours. I turn the bbq on on one side and wait about 15 minutes to get it up to 200 degrees on the other side. I put a cast iron skillet on the hot side to keep temps stable. We descended from the church by steep stone stairways which curved this way and that down narrow alleys between the packed and dirty tenements of the village. It was a quarter well stocked with deformed, leering, unkempt and uncombed idiots, who held out hands or caps and begged piteously. The people of the quarter were not all idiots, of course, but all that begged seemed to be, and were said to be.. I feel like I should tell you these details before I fully reply, and I hope you will respect that in many ways we are different. That being said, we also do share some similar opinions and beliefs. I hope that knowing 양평출장샵 these details about me will not deter you from conversing with me and reading what I have to say.. Turns out my face is sensitive to cetearyl alcohol, which is used in a lot of the CeraVe moisturizers. Would later confirm this when I used a Sephora sample moisturizer on my face and my face began tingling/stinging. Sure enough when I looked at the ingredients on the Sephora moisturizer, it had cetearyl alcohol in the top 5 ingredients listed. The mediterranean climate allows for air drying, 양평출장샵 so most people here don own a dryer. So instead they iron the clothes to get rid of wrinkles and provide some sterilization. The sterilization part is why I do the baby clothes and our underwear, etc. It was the Wild still clinging to him, asserting itself through him. This feeling had been accentuated by the Ishmaelite life he had led from his puppyhood. Danger lurked in contacts. 1 point submitted 4 days agoIt is extremely odd, and unlikely it was a mistake. Out of any items in the game, it one of the top valued. It also has no "spawn" location, it only spawned from completion of a minigame. Did they ever drop the ball. There's NOTHING to do in multiplayer. Free roam has 1 type of mission, stranger missions, which are decently fun but get so repetitive and eventually makes it boring. This is so not cool, considering I a large 17 year old guy at this point and I sure it looked incredibly creepy. So I ask him to get off and sit in his own chair. After that we started talking again and after another 20 minutes or so it about time for me to leave, so I let him know and start to get up and he says rather loudly, something along the lines of "No you can leave! you my best friend ever! Will you ever come back?!" I felt strange and confused by the whole situation and just told him "yeah, maybe." This all happened while my father and this kid father were not but 10 feet away listening and watching.
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Injection (liquid) Nose Job
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Injection (liquid) Nose Job Summary Rhinoplasty is technically demanding surgery, and even in the best of hands, postoperative healing and the most exceptional aesthetic outcome can be unpredictable. In addition to the risks of general anesthesia, and a protracted postoperative convalescence, rhinoplasty may lead to adverse cosmetic results. Even in patients with a first satisfactory outcome, slight asymmetries, depressions, and contour irregularities may present several years after surgery. The correction of these minor problems often requires surgical revision, and the surgical options available are limited in number, expensive, time-consuming, and prone to further complications.   Non-surgical rhinoplasty, injection rhinoplasty (filler, fat, or botox) has gained popularity for both primary and revision nose enhancement procedures. In selected people, injection rhinoplasty can give a ready to vise result in the convenience of the office setting, and the process is minimally invasive and has an excellent safety record. It has been proposed for patients. However, unlike surgical rhinoplasty, it is limited in its ability to produce a significant change in the caudal aspects of the nose. What is Injection Nose Job? WATCH THESE VIDOES AND READ THE ARTICLE IF YOU CONSIDERING INJECTION NOSE JOB WHAT IS LIQUID NOSE JOB? INJECTION NOSE SHAPING PLAY VIDEO FILLER NSOE INJECTION INJECTION NOSE JOB PLAY VIDEO FAT NOSE INJECTION INJECTION NOSE JOB PLAY VIDEO BOTOX NOSE INJECTION SPIDER AND VARICOSE VEINS PLAY VIDEO INJECTION NOSE JOB RESULTS (before and after) SPIDER AND VARICOSE VEINS PLAY VIDEO Rhinoplasty is technically demanding surgery, and even in the best of hands, postoperative healing and the most exceptional aesthetic outcome can be unpredictable. In addition to the risks of general anesthesia, and a protracted postoperative convalescence, rhinoplasty may lead to adverse cosmetic results. Even in patients with a first satisfactory outcome, slight asymmetries, depressions, and contour irregularities may present several years after surgery. The correction of these minor problems often requires surgical revision, and the surgical options available are limited in number, expensive, time-consuming, and prone to further complications.  Patients may also have functional complaints secondary to iatrogenic nasal valve disruption, leading to the dissatisfaction of both patients and surgeons. Nonsurgical rhinoplasty, Filler rhinoplasty, or augmentation rhinoplasty using an injectable dermal filler has gained popularity for both primary and revision nose enhancement procedures. In selected people, filler injections can give ready-to-vise results in the convenience of the office setting, and the process is minimally invasive and has an excellent safety record. An advantage of using fillers is that surgeons may sculpt the material after injection, offering options not available through traditional correction. It has been proposed to patients interested in less invasive techniques than conventional rhinoplasty. Minor post-rhinoplasty asymmetries, irregularities, and bony prominences may also address. However, unlike surgical rhinoplasty, it is limited in its ability to produce a significant change in the caudal aspects of the nose. Injection Nose Job, Who Need it? The nose is one of the most critical cosmetic units of the face. Many patients dissatisfied with the appearance of their nose seek cosmetic improvement as early as during adolescence. Like other facial structures, the nose is affected by the aging process. Typically, nose tip drop is observed, along with loss of subcutaneous tissue, which highlights its undulating osteocartilaginous support. Discreet volumetric changes in the frontal-nasal angle, nasal dorsum, and columella–philtrum junction produce significant differences in our perception of nasal features. These areas can be injected with fillers to rejuvenate the nose or improve the nasal silhouette. Injections Nose Job. How do I look Like After? A non-surgical procedure does not have the extended downtime associated with surgical rhinoplasty, which means less interruption of daily activities, and it is relatively more affordable in the short term, although surgical rhinoplasty may be more cost-effective in a long time. Patients are informed that they may experience some swelling, tenderness, and redness for 1–2 days, but no specific aftercare instructions are necessary. However, Radiesse does seem to produce more immediate swelling than HA fillers, so over-correction by about 10% does not seem to provide any untoward effect to place the dermal filler.  For this reason, linear threading is now used most commonly, which minimizes the risk of nodules. Injections Nose Job. Are Results Permanent? The use of permanent fillers in the nose poses more risks of severe adverse reactions, skin necrosis, and extrusion in addition to the almost complete difficulty evacuating the filler thoroughly and the apparent difficulties in future surgical planning. Recent use of dermal filler is in nonsurgical ‘injection’ nose job to enhance the nasal profile and correct asymmetries, whether congenital, traumatic, iatrogenic, or due to aging. The aesthetic nasal and paranasal units can be treated as a whole, or as aesthetic subunits individually as needed. Discreet volumetric changes in the frontonasal angle, nasal dorsum, and nasolabial angle lead to significant differences in our perception of the nasal aesthetic. HA and CaHA are the safest available agents and can be injected with local or no anesthesia. In our experience, the correction can last up to 2 years with Restylane, and three years with Radiesse, probably because of the relative immobility of the mid-face. The primary advantages of using fillers in the nose are the lower costs and risks associated with anesthesia and major surgery. The disadvantages include potential damage to the nasal skin envelope, the need for repeated treatments to keep up the results, and a decrease in the surgeon’s drive to make the perfect result. The only excellent candidates for nasal fillers are patients needing minimal dorsal or sidewall correction who are not amenable to surgical intervention. Fat transfer also shows itself as a first-line nonsurgical alternative to the modeling of nasal shape and profile in primary and secondary cases of patients who refuse surgical rhinoplasty and accept limitations in the results. It also is possible to combine surgical rhinoplasty with lipo-implantation in the dorsum, radix, glabella, or pre-maxillary area to improve volume and shape in these areas without the need to use cartilage grafts or robust prostheses. Physicians who choose to inject the nose with fillers have a responsibility to follow their patients strictly for potential complications. Nostril reshaping can be performed by weakening the dilator nasi with small doses of Botox. Botox injections into the levator labii superioris alaeque nasi and into the dilator nasi can help to narrow nasal flare, while the expansion of nasal flare can be performed using HA products. What is Dermal Filler Injection Nose Job? What is  Radiesse (Calcium Hydroxylapatite) Filler Injection Nose Job? Calcium hydroxylapatite (CaHA) is used for post-rhinoplasty deformities of the dorsum, supratip, sidewall, ala, saddle nose, and retracted columella deformities. CaHA has been the product favored by Prof Moawad for masking large nasal convexities. The CaHA is then placed deeply onto the bony cartilaginous skeleton and shaped into the dorsum, much like a sculptor working with terra cotta clay.  Functional internal valve collapse may be addressed with an endonasal ‘spreader’ injection of calcium hydroxylapatite (Radiesse) into the apex of the internal nasal valve. CaHA, in our experience, is a much more predictable product than HA. The persistence of correction is about 10 to 12 months and rarely longer. The product’s lack of hydrophilic properties also prevents skin and soft tissue expansion beyond the original placement. This ensures that the patient can be treated to complete correction per the discretion of the injector What is Hyaluronic Acid  Filler (Restylane and Juvederm) Injection Nose Job? Because of its higher concentration of cross-linked hyaluronic acid and lower hydrophilicity, Restylane is preferred for the treatment of the thin skin of the nasal dorsum and sidewalls. Juvederm is preferred for the nasal tip and alar rims because it is more easily molded to the desired contour, up to 1 week after injection. The longevity of hyaluronic acid fillers in the nose appears to be higher than in other areas of the face. As with collagen, patients should avoid all blood thinners for 10 days before treatment. Before the patient undergoes treatment with soft-tissue fillers, he or she should be anesthetized to maximize comfort. Topical anesthetics are valid if the proper time interval elapses before injection. Alternatively, one can reconstitute 1 ml of dermal filler with 0.3 of 1% lidocaine. Another benefit of this mixing has decreased the viscosity and extrusion force to inject the product. Areas for correction are marked and ready with an alcohol wipe (70% Isopropyl alcohol). How Filler Injection Nose Job is Done? First Stage In a single pass, with the entry point at the tip of the nose, we begin with the augmentation of the columella-labial angle. The needle is advanced along the subcutaneous plane, just deep to the dermis, all the way down to the nasal spine. Then Radiesse or Restylane is injected slowly, carefully observing the filling of the columella-labial angle; this usually requires 0.4 ml. Once the columella-labial angle is corrected, then the needle is gradually withdrawn while injecting filler with the intention of strengthening and raising the columella column. This maneuver corrects the columella labial angle and straightens, lengthens, and increases the columella. This should produce a tip projection that is more anterior and with less cranial rotation. By extending the columella, the nose should seem more isosceles-shaped and the nostril more teardrop-shaped when seen from the basal angle. Second Stage The second stage of NSR begins with the augmentation of the entire length of the dorsum in the midline from the new radix to the tip. The width of the dorsum can be effectively controlled with the volume of the injected filler in a single row, not multiple rows of injection. The filling should be enough and uniform to produce aesthetically pleasing dorsal aesthetic lines. The volume of the injected filler requires a more precise titration should there be a dorsal hump. Then the radix and forehead dorsum angle is further augmented. The radix is the most recessed part of the dorsum, and it often requires more filler. Boluses of filler are injected perpendicularly in the midline as a series of interrupted columns while using the fingers to grasp the radix to limit the risk of the filler material spreading which can make the dorsum appear bulky. The endpoint is to create a new radix at the about level of the supratarsal fold, to create about 135 angulations of the nasal dorsum to the forehead, and to create distinct and aesthetically pleasing dorsal aesthetic lines. The nasal dorsum is best approached using small amounts of hyaluronic acid. After injection, the hyaluronic acid should be gently massaged to help with even distribution, thus avoiding contour irregularities. After injection, the surgeon should allow 15 minutes to pass to give the soft tissues time to adjust and the product sufficiently diffuse. This step allows for a correct assessment of effect before further injection. The volume of injection and skin color should be assessed regularly to avoid any compromise of vascular perfusion to the nasal skin. Layering the hyaluronic acid from deep to superficial is preferred for volume restoration of the nasal dorsum. A threading technique along the long axis of the nasal dorsum should be used to keep up the proper nasal shape. Third Stage The nasal sidewall is also best addressed using small amounts of hyaluronic acid with post-injection massage and a 15-minute delay before reinjection. The skin of the nasal sidewall should also be continually assessed for any evidence of vascular compromise. The preferred method of injection is through a crosshatching technique to do a steady volume expansion along the flat plane of the nasal sidewall. As mentioned earlier, Restylane is the preferred product to use under the thin skin of the nasal sidewall. Fourth Stage The last aspect of NSR is shaping the nasal tip. The essential element of this stage is to inject a few superficial small boluses into the tip to further the appearance of tip lengthening in the anterior direction, to lessen the appearance of cephalic rotation, and to make the tip pointier. The injection plane is at the level of the deep dermis. In a virgin nose, we usually use a softer hyaluronic acid (HA) filler because it can be readily reversed, and we pay close attention to the visual signs of ischemia immediately after injection, with hyaluronidase readily available. The use of small amounts of hyaluronic acid, post-injection massage, and 15-minute delay before reinjection also apply to the treatment of the nasal tip. More than any other area, the nasal tip skin must be treated with conservative volumes and continuous assessment of skin perfusion to avoid potentially disastrous sequelae of nasal tip skin compromise. Considering the aesthetically sensitive contours of the nasal tip and ala, the ability to mold Juvederm after injection proves to be a benefit for the patient and surgeon. Some injectors prefer Juvederm for treatment of the nasal tip and ala because of its malleability several days after injection. As before mentioned, Juvederm is particularly useful for the patient who wants more tip fullness, as it has the potential for post-injection swelling. Alternatively, Restylane can be used in the nasal tip if more control of the last volume augmentation is desired. When injecting Juvederm or Restylane for the nasal tip and ala, one should inject via a serial puncture technique to maximize precision and accuracy along this aesthetically critical area. Small volumes of hyaluronic acid in the range of 0.1 to 0.2 ml can result in significant contour improvement in the nasal tip. However, some authors do not use HA in the soft tissues of the tip or the nasal base because of increased complication rates.  This angle may be opened further with an injection of 2 units of Botox into the depressor septi muscle. Regardless of which HA is used, slight under-correction is recommended to help compensate for the post-treatment expansion. Immediately following injection, digital pressure is applied, and the implant is molded into place. Bleeding stop with lightweight using a cotton-tipped applicator. Finally, an ice pack is applied to decrease postoperative bruising and edema. Injected filler feels like ‘‘play-doh’’ immediately after injection, and it can be easily molded and reshaped to sculpt the nose further. More top-offs may be required at this stage. What are the Risks of Filler Injection Nose Job? Complications related to CaHA injection are more difficult to reverse than HA. Therefore, HA must be the first choice for inexperienced surgeons using fillers for the first time. With time and experience, the use of CaHA might be considered. As opposed to hyaluronic acids, which can be treated with hyaluronidase or needle aspiration, the particulate fillers or permanent fillers are challenging to remove if there is an irregularity. Erythema edema and bruising are common after treatment and typically last a few days. When injected too superficially, a bluish Tyndall effect can be seen, which is visible hyaluronic acid seen through the translucent epidermis. Fortunately, these bluish cysts are easily corrected by nicking the skin with a small-gauge needle (30 gauge) or No. 11 blades and expressing the superficial, unwanted dermal filler. Occasionally, palpable nodules can be felt under the skin, which often occurs when the multiple-puncture technique is used, or depot injections are performed. injection nose job fillerinjection nose job fillerinjection nose job fillerinjection nose job fillerInjection nose job-fillerInjection nose job-fillerinjection nose job fillerinjection nose job fillerinjection nose job fillerinjection nose job fillerinjection nose job fillerinjection nose job fillerinjection nose job fillerinjection nose job fillerinjection nose job fillerinjection nose job fillerinjection nose job fillerinjection nose job fillerinjection nose job fillerinjection nose job fillerinjection nose job fillerinjection nose job fillerinjection nose job fillerinjection nose job fillerinjection nose job fillerinjection nose job fillerinjection nose job fillerinjection nose job fillerinjection nose job fillerinjection nose job fillerinjection nose job fillerinjection nose job filler Prev 1of17 Next Injection Nose Job. Filler (before & after)How We do Injection Nose job. Fat Injection Rhinoplasty. Fat Injections It is essential to understand that accurate nasal modeling is obtained through improving architectural elements of bone and cartilage, leaving to adapt to changes and draw the result. Fat injection applied to nasal aesthetics works oppositely by altering only soft tissues to mask structural imbalances or irregularities except when it is used in combination with rhinoplasty to supplement deficient bone in the radix, glabella, and premaxillary region. For these reasons, fat injection to the nose is a sign only for some selected nasal deformities of patients who refuse rhinoplasty as the primary choice and clearly understand the limitations in the results. Based on skin quality improvement, fat injection to the nose could be the first choice for some selected cases where a high degree of scarring or adherence might jeopardize dissection or blood supply during open or closed rhinoplasty. It is essential to tell the patient that this technique only camouflages imperfections and does not give any improvement in respiratory function. Obviously, we will face patients with bone or cartilage architectures that cannot be concealed by fat grafts. Fat transfer is performed at MSI, on an outpatient basis, and usually under local anesthesia. Medication to ease any pain will be given one hour before the procedure if needed. The entire procedure takes one hour. Fat transfer is a two-step process. Typically, fat is extracted from the abdomen, buttocks, thighs or knees, and re-injected beneath the skin in areas where cosmetic correction is needed.  Before fat can be re-injected, it must be processed to get viable fat cells. Prof Moawad can take advantage of the two first tissue planes when injecting fat into the nose.  The SMAS plane and the subcutaneous plane.  Fat is injected routinely in a retrograde way using 1.2- to 1.4-mm blunt-tip cannulas or 22-24-gauge microcannula and applying very gentle pressure on the plunger. The glabella and radix were approached from the middle frontal region 1 cm above the eyebrows, and the premaxillary region was approached from the nasolabial fold 2 cm lateral to the nasal ala. To correct minor irregularities, 0.3 to 0.8 mL of cryopreserved micro fat graft material is injected 1 to 3 times; for significant abnormalities or defects, 1 to 6 mL was injected 3 to 6 times. In secondary cases, the surgeon should be cautious because the injection plane will not be found with ease, and different degrees of fibrosis will impair cannula advancement and fat placement. Read the full article
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fariyaaah · 3 years
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NO OTHER LIKE A MOTHER - why is maternal and child health so important for society
Mothers have often been seen as means and not ends. Health services have been targeted by mothers to help them produce healthy babies, forgetting there is a woman in the mother, who also has a right to health and survival. Society has an obligation to fulfil a woman’s right to life and health, when she is risking death to give us life’. – Prof. Mahmoud F. Fathallah (2012).
As an OT, when I think of maternal and child health, I think of things like postpartum depression, child developmental delays, teenage mums’ mental health and the associated stigma, birth deformities and the big debate on the morals and ethics of abortion and a wide array of other physical, mental and social issues.
So, what exactly is maternal health is. Maternal health is the wellbeing of mother’s during the stages of pregnancy, childbirth as well as the period after childbirth. (WHO).
For more information on what maternal health is, please click the following link: https://www.who.int/health-topics/maternal-health#tab=tab_1
Despite WHO stating that due to Sub-Saharan Africa having insubstantial humanitarian settings, it has a role in the greatest burden of maternal deaths, South Africa has made significant progress with regards to the improvement of maternal health. To further reiterate statistic wise; For every 1000s live births, only 5 women died during pregnancy or 2 months after childbirth. (SADHS,2016).  Currently, maternal health remains a global issue solely because the lives of millions of women (who are of a reproductive age) can be saved via maternal health care services. This goes to raise the question of why the maternal death statistics are still sky high despite an obvious solution?
Social determinants of maternal and child mortality in South Africa and ultimately a developing community context such as Inanda are attributed to a wide array of factors such as poverty, lower levels of education amongst its residents, nutritional inadequacies, gender-based violence, HIV/AIDS, stigma associated with health and poverty. (Mmusi-Phetoe, 2016). With regards to my experience in the Inanda community, upon screening the clinic for potential OT client’s, a mother expressed that she knows a mum and child who cannot make it to the clinic but are in desperate need of OT services. This goes to show how a lack of access to healthcare can be an enemy in the battle of maternal and child health. In a low-income community such as Inanda, the options for healthcare include a clinic. Often problems associated with clinics in a community environment would be that the location is far from potential client’s homes, (this comes with added transport fees which builds onto the poverty experienced in community settings), long-waiting lines due to scarce availability of clinics, and inadequate access to services specifically targeted for maternal and child health.
So why is child and maternal health important to society?
Pre and post childbirth mental health is not only important for the mother’s physical and mental health, but also adds to her capacity in terms of giving love and care to her child, not only at birth but as the child grows too. Mothers play a vital role in advocating for the child’s health as well as quality of life, however this can be achieved only if their own maternal health is looked after appropriately. (Pettyman,2016). In a community setting like Inanda, with minimal resources and low-income residents, the advocacy and early intervention of child and mental health can lead to the ultimate development of the community in terms of lower mortality rates and overall better health of both mum and child. It is to be questioned as to why there are so many mothers and children in the queues of clinics but no services aimed specifically for maternal and child health? Possible answers can be lack of funding, mistrust of staff members or simply the lack of education on the importance of child and maternal health
So what is the implications of this issue in OT practice:
In a community-based setting like Inanda, I observed that majority of the patient’s that visited were mother’s with their babies. Upon questioning these mother’s, I found that majority come to the clinic for a check up on their baby’s only. I then investigated to see what these ‘check-ups’ mean and discovered that it covers the child’s basic physical vitals. From this I could see the lack of services that do a thorough check up of the physical and mental health of both the mother and child. In addition to this, the checkups being conducted are by health professionals who may be able to recognize issues in child and maternal health above their scope, and therefore these patient’s continue to float through the system unexposed or with the false belief that their child is in good health. This is where OT steps in. As part of the OT description, it is our duty to look at both mother and child holistically. The challenges that I faced as an OT visiting a clinic in a community setting was screening all potential client’s, due to the busyness of the clinic. Upon doing an ‘in queue’ assessment with one of the mother’s, I found that her baby was breastfeeding incorrectly and this made me think how many other mother’s there are out there doing the same thing. This then is an implication for me as an OT to then advocate for my profession, in terms of what occupational therapy is and how they help with child and maternal health, as well as to educate the client’s on signs and symptoms within themselves as a mother and their child in order to recognize when they would seek further intervention from an OT. Judging by the amount of maternal client’s with the potential for OT intervention, I also started to ponder as to why there isn’t more awareness on what OT is and why isn’t there more in a community context such as Inanda?
However, this community based setting is not only limited to the health clinic of the community. I am yet to visit the schools and creches in the community to further investigate the extent of child and maternal health in a learning and social environment. I would like to conclude my blog by saying that maternal and child health impacts our society tremendously. The insufficient access to healthcare in this aspect, lack of awareness on what child and maternal health is and even just the lack of advocacy in it can severely impact the way a community can develop. In my opinion, us as occupational therapists, as well as members of the PHC team, need to find a long term solution in advocating the importance of maternal and child health in community based settings to help bring awareness to it and ultimately develop the community in terms of quality of life. Without pointing out the importance of MHC in the community, the community is at risk for having members with a wide array of secondary complications such as higher mortalities, child developmental delays and other health issues .
I look forward to making a bigger impact in terms of OT child and maternal health intervention in the community setting as well as visiting the schools and creches to help improve these community member’s lives in both functional and meaningful ways.
If you are looking for maternal and child health services please contact the following number: 0800 012 322
REFERENCES:
Africa, S. (2021). Maternal health care in SA shows signs of improvement | Statistics South Africa. Retrieved 5 August 2021, from http://www.statssa.gov.za/?p=13102
Maternal health. (2021). Retrieved 5 August 2021, from https://www.who.int/health-topics/maternal-health#tab=tab_2
Hellerstedt, W. (2009). What is Maternal and Child Health? | Leadership Education in Maternal & Child Public Health. Retrieved 5 August 2021, from https://mch.umn.edu/what-is-mch/
Pettyman, B. (2016). The Importance of Maternal Health During Pregnancy | Riverside Med Group. Retrieved 5 August 2021, from https://www.riversidemedgroup.com/why-maternal-health-is-important/
Fathalla, P. (2012). Milestones in the movement for safe motherhood (2012) | Figo. Retrieved 5 August 2021, from https://www.figo.org/news/milestones-movement-safe-motherhood-2012
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annatakestechanim · 3 years
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Apr. 19th
Today began with the last set of paper presentations. Alyssa presented “Frequency-Domain Smoke Guiding,” which sought to keep the large-scale flow of smoke simulation while increasing resolution. Their results looked very compelling -- the smoke was very realistic, and it collided with obstacles very well. However, for some of the side-by-side comparisons with other methods, I thought the others (although quite different in appearance) still looked believable...? I suppose it’s just up to the artist what specific look they want. Then, Anne gave the very last paper presentation on “AnisoMPM: Animating Anisotropic Damage Mechanics.” The motivation behind this paper is that simulation dynamic fracture is hard; these authors proposed a method for animating the dynamic fracture of isotropic, transversely isotropic, and orthotropic materials. The pork belly, fish, and string cheese tearing looked alright, but perhaps a bit too rubbery; plus, they all seemed to fracture in very similar ways, despite being very different in real life. I was expecting the fish meat to be a little more jagged and rigid and the string cheese to be stringier.
Then, Prof. Pollard continued with deformables. We first took a look at “Meshless Deformations Based on Shape Matching,” which presented an approach for simulating deformable objects fast and stably, utilizing a geometrically-motivated underlying model. It handles point-based objects and does not require connectivity information (i.e., meshless). Whereas standard finite element approaches struggle to compress things to their flattest point, this paper’s demo video showed a rubber duck being squished completely flat, then bouncing back right away with no problem.
Next, we went over “Invertible Finite Elements for Robust Simulation of Large Deformation” and their algorithm for the finite element simulation of elastoplastic solids. The researchers were particularly seeking to resolve the element inversion that can result from standard finite element simulation algorithms. They demoed an elastic Buddha being smushed between two gears, which was horrifying to watch, but also displayed how stable the object was throughout deformation.
Lastly, we got to see two of Prof. Pollard’s papers, starting with “Direct Control of Simulated Non-human Characters,” which sought to make finite element simulations fast and interactive. The fish and starfish flopping on the pier looked great, and especially considering that it was animated interactively is even more impressive. Then, we discussed “Fast Simulation of Skeleton-Driven Deformable Body Characters.” Their method begins by computing nonlinear strain, which is used to compute stress, which is used to compute the elastic forces that are finally applied to the nodes. To speed up their algorithm, they utilized a coarse mesh. The trick to doing so was the determine how to distribute the mass and how much mass to apply to each point.
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drnikolatesla · 7 years
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***Nikola Tesla’s Views On the Moon And A Solar Eclipse***
“Three theories have been advanced for the origin of the moon. According to the oldest suggested by the great German philosopher Kant, and developed by Laplace in his monumental treatise “Mécanique Céleste,” the planets have been thrown off from larger central masses by centrifugal force. Nearly forty years ago Prof. George H. Darwin in a masterful essay on tidal friction furnished mathematical proofs, deemed unrefutable, that the moon had separated from the earth. Recently this established theory has been attacked by Prof. T. J. J. See in a remarkable work on the “Evolution of the Stellar Systems,” in which he propounds the view that centrifugal force was altogether inadequate to bring about the separation and that all, including the moon, have come from the depths of space and have been captured. Still a third hypothesis of unknown origin exists which has been examined and commented upon by Prof. W. H. Pickering in “Popular Astronomy of 1907,” and according to which the moon was torn from the earth when the later was partially solidified, this accounting for the continents which might not have been formed otherwise.
“Undoubtedly planets and satellites have originated in both ways and, in my opinion, it is not difficult to ascertain the character of their birth. The following conclusions can be safely drawn:
“1. A heavenly body thrown off from a larger one cannot rotate on its axis. The mass, rendered fluid by the combined action of heat and pressure, upon the reduction of the latter immediately stiffens, being at the same time deformed by gravitational pull. The shape becomes permanent upon cooling and solidification and the smaller mass continues to move about the larger one as tho it were rigidly connected to it except for pendular swings or librations due to varying orbital velocity. Such motion precludes the possibility of axial rotation in the strictly physical sense. The moon has never spun around as is well demonstrated by the fact that the most precise measurements have failed to show any measurable flattening in form.
“2. If a planetary body in its orbital movement turns the same side towards the central mass this is a positive proof that it has been separated from the latter and is a true satellite.
“3. A planet revolving on its axis in its passage around another cannot have been thrown off from the same but must have been captured.”
–Nikola Tesla
“Famous Scientific Illusions.” Electrical Experimenter, February, 1919.
“You know that in a solar eclipse the moon comes between the sun and the earth, and that its shadow is projected upon the earth’s surface [Figure 3].  Evidently, in a given moment, the shadow will just touch at a mathematical point, the earth, assuming it to be a sphere.
“Let us imagine that my transmitter is located at this point, and that the current generated by it now passes through the earth.  It does not pass through the earth in the ordinary acceptance of the term, it only penetrates to a certain depth according to the frequency.  Most of it goes on the surface, but with frequencies such as I employ, it will dive a few miles below.  It can be mathematically shown that it is immaterial how it passes; the aggregate effect of these currents is as if the whole current passes from the transmitter, which I call the pole, to the opposite point, which I call the antipode.
“Assume, then, that here is the transmitter, and imagine that this is the surface of the sea, and that now comes the shadow of the moon and touches, on a mathematical point, the calm ocean.  You can readily see that as the surface of the water, owing to the enormous radius of the earth, is nearly a plane, that point where the shadow falls will immediately, on the slightest motion of the shadow downward, enlarge the circle at a terrific rate, and it can be shown mathematically that this rate is infinite.  In other words, this half-circle on this side will fly over the globe as the shadow goes down; will first start at infinite velocity to enlarge, and then slower and slower and slower, and as the moon’s shadow goes further and further and further, it will get slower and slower until, finally, when the three bodies are on the plane of the ecliptic, right in line one with the other in the same plane, then that shadow will pass over the globe with its true velocity in space.  Exactly that same thing happens in the application of my system, and I will show this next.”
–Nikola Tesla
“Nikola Tesla On His Works With Alternating Currents and Their Application to Wireless Telegraphy, and Transmission of Power.” Twenty First Century Books, Breckenridge, Colorado, 2002.
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