(TheOnion.com)

PostmodernJukebox Stay Home And Listen To Our New Spotify Playlist: https://pmjlive.com/stayhome-playlist See PMJ on tour: http://pmjlive.com?IQid=Youtube By popular demand, here’s the un-aged and un-filtered Postmodern Jukebox cover of “Call Me Maybe.” Download Here: https://smarturl.it/pmjtwerk Scott Bradlee’s Postmodern Jukebox: https://www.facebook.com/postmodernju… The Band: Robyn Adele Anderson – vocals Adam Kubota – bass Chip Thomas – drums Scott Bradlee – piano

By Robin Wright April 8, 2020 (NewYorker.com)

April in Washington, D.C., is normally the month of nature’s renewal—and my favorite—for the pastel blossoms of azaleas and tulips, the shades of green in new grass, the warming temperatures, and the soft light that lingers into evening. This spring, the window is the prism of human existence—looking through the glass and waiting for the pestilence to pass. From my window, I can see a pear tree shedding white flowers to make way for sprouting leaves. Little else is happening on the other side of the pane. As eerie as this spring has already been, Surgeon General Jerome Adams warned on Sunday that this week will be “the hardest and saddest” in most Americans’ lives. “This is going to be our Pearl Harbor moment, our 9/11 moment, only it’s not going to be localized. It’s going to be happening all over the country,” he said, on Fox News.

I began to wonder how much the human spirit can endure—and for how long. We’re only in the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic, with a second wave expected in the fall. “Catastrophizing is really bad for your mental health,” Samuel Paul Veissière, a co-director of the Culture, Mind and Brain Program at McGill University, told me. “You bring depression into being by worrying. And that has an impact on quality of life and immune functions.” To circumvent the numbing fear of becoming the next numeral in a running tally of cases, I started playing a mental game—identifying the people I’ve known or covered who were imprisoned, isolated, or banished in far worse conditions. Covering the world’s wars and political hellholes, there have been many—some famous, many little-known. Each of their stories reaffirmed what humans are capable of bearing—and eventually overcoming.The New Yorker’s coronavirus news coverage and analysis are free for all readers.

In the nineteen-seventies, I covered the apartheid era in South Africa, where Nelson Mandela was incarcerated in a damp concrete cell on Robben Island, a former leper colony converted into a prison. “I could walk the length of my cell in three paces,” Mandela recalled, in his autobiography. “When I lay down, I could feel the wall with my feet and my head grazed the concrete at the other side. The width was about six feet. That small cramped space was to be my home for I knew not how long.” Mandela’s prism on the world was a small window with six bars but little to see. Robben Island was five miles off the coast. He didn’t have access, as we do now, to newspapers, telephones, and a television. He once wrote the warden begging for pajamas that only white prisoners received. After his wife was arrested, in 1969, he wrote his children, “For long you may live like orphans.” In 1988, he developed tuberculosis, another highly contagious airborne virus. Mandela was imprisoned for twenty-seven years; he was seventy-two when he made his famous walk to freedom. He went on to re-create a nation and win the Nobel Peace Prize. I saw him twice after he was elected President, in 1994. He was never self-indulgent about his confinement, the conditions of life during isolation, the separation from family and society—or his disease. He endured, brilliantly.

In 1992, exactly twenty-eight years ago this week, I flew with Elie Wiesel to the Nobel Peace Prize Forum, an annual conference held in the Midwest to honor the laureates and highlight human rights. Wiesel had won the Nobel six years earlier. Wiesel was a child when his family was confined, first in Auschwitz, where his mother and younger sister were killed, then in Buchenwald, during the Second World War. There’s a haunting picture of Wiesel packed with other men and boys on wooden planks, shelves, really, that were stacked in four rows on top of each other, floor to ceiling, in Buchenwald. The men were all skeletal. They had no windows to the outside world.

My father fought to liberate Ohrdruf, a subcamp of Buchenwald and the first Nazi camp seized by the U.S. Army, in April of 1945. I still have his letter to my mother about the horrors he found. On our flight, Wiesel and I talked about our fathers’ experiences in the camp. He told me a longer version of what he recounted about his father’s fate when Elie returned to Buchenwald, in 2009. “The day he died was one of the darkest in my life. He became sick, weak, and I was there,” he said. “I was there when he asked for help, for water. I was there to receive his last words. But I was not there when he called for me, although we were in the same block; he on the upper bed and I on the lower bed. He called my name, and I was too afraid to move. All of us were. And then he died. I was there, but I was not there.” Wiesel was sixteen when Buchenwald was liberated. He came out of his imprisonment an orphan, a pauper, and stateless. Yet he survived another seventy years, wrote remarkable books, lectured around the world, and became a living reminder of the Holocaust. He made his life a testament to the human spirit.

In 2017, I met Mansour Omari, a Syrian journalist who chronicled the Assad regime’s arrests and human-rights abuses during its ruthless crackdown on Arab Spring protesters—until Omari, too, was arrested, in 2012. He was locked up in a filthy underground cell with so little space inside that the prisoners—the number in his cell fluctuated from sixty to more than eighty—took turns sitting, standing, squatting or sleeping. They shared a single toilet and a sewer hole to defecate—with no toilet paper. Bugs and mites were pervasive; cases of scabies were common. “The smell was unbelievable,” Omari told me. “People were, almost all of them, sick. All of them had blisters or wounds. It’s infections that eat your flesh so quickly.” Omari lost seventy-five pounds. Prisoners used salt to treat each other’s wounds after beatings or torture. “This is how we healed each other,” Omari said. “Sometimes it worked. Sometimes not.”

Omari’s cell had no windows. The prisoners had no communication with the outside world. Many of their families didn’t know where they were—or even if they were alive. Omari came up with a scheme to write the names of the prisoners—using a quill fashioned from a chicken bone and ink blended from rust chipped from the cell bars and blood squeezed from the gums of prisoners diseased by malnutrition. With no paper, they wrote the names on small strips of cloth torn from a shirt. The prisoners wrote eighty-two names on the strips of cloth and then sewed them into the collar and cuff of a single shirt—using a sliver of chicken bone as a needle. Whoever got out first would wear the shirt and be responsible for informing the other prisoners’ families. Omari was the first one summoned for transfer. He wore the shirt—only to be sent to one prison, and then another. The names began to fade from moisture and perspiration; half the names were lost. After he was finally released, Omari fled to Turkey, then Sweden. I met him in 2017, when the little blood-stained cloths were exhibited at the Holocaust Museum, in Washington. He told me that he managed to reach thirty of the families of the men imprisoned with him in Syria. Three of the five in the group that assembled the list of names—including the tailor who sewed the strips back into the shirt—died in jail.

Omari and I are now friends on Facebook. I messaged him today, to say that his story of isolation—and his ultimate resilience—inspired a sense of hope about the resoluteness of the human spirit. I noticed that he had recently changed the picture on his home page. It features four first responders—their faces imprinted with the ridges of masks and goggles worn while they work with those infected with covid-19. The caption reads, “Protectors of humanity.”

Omari messaged me back that the prisoners kept their sanity while isolated from the outside world by showing solidarity. “Unity was best shown when we all knew that if any one of us ‘violates’ the jailors’ orders, like to speak loudly, we will be beaten collectively,” he wrote. “If we did not clean the floor of the cell twice a day our wounds and infections will get much worse. We all had to check our clothes and bodies for bugs and kill them twice a day, because if one did not do that, the bugs from his clothes will move to the detainees next to him.” The key to survival, he said, was that “suffering the same situation gave us unity and sympathy.”

Amid this weekend’s dire forecasts and calls for isolation, I telephoned Haleh Esfandiari, my friend and the former director of the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center, in Washington, D.C. She is an Iranian-American who left Tehran during the 1979 revolution but returned regularly to see her widowed mother. During one visit, in 2007, Esfandiari was stopped en route to the airport to return to the United States. She was initially barred from leaving Iran, put under virtual house arrest with her ninety-three-year-old mother, and summoned daily for long interrogations. After several weeks, she was taken to the notorious Evin Prison. Her small cell had no furniture; she bundled two chadors together to sleep on the floor. It had no toilet; she had to summon a prison matron to use a communal hole in the ground. With nothing to do, she pleaded for books; she was given a Quran, a book of medieval poetry, and a copy of “The Last Temptation of Christ.” Her only view of the outside world was through two small barred windows eight feet from the ground; she could see nothing but a sliver of the sky. “The third time I saw the moon, I knew I had been there for three months,” she told me. She spent a hundred and five days in solitary confinement.

“Oh, there was no comparison with then and now,” she told me, when I asked her to compare her confinements. “I can read. I can write. I’m with my husband. I’m not worried for my safety or my future. In Evin, no matter how much I wanted to, I couldn’t open a door and walk out even into the prison corridor, let alone into the open air. In our self-imposed quarantine, I can always open the door of the house and walk out.” And, someday, we will.

---

A Guide to the Coronavirus

• How to practice social distancing, from responding to a sick housemate to the pros and cons of ordering food.
• How the coronavirus behaves inside of a patient.
• Can survivors help cure the disease and rescue the economy?
• What it means to contain and mitigate the coronavirus outbreak.
• The success of Hong Kong and Singapore in stemming the spread holds lessons for how to contain it in the United States.
• The coronavirus is likely to spread for more than a year before a vaccine is widely available.
• With each new virus, we’ve scrambled for a new treatment. Can we prepare antivirals to combat the next global crisis?
• How pandemics have propelled public-health innovations, prefigured revolutions, and redrawn maps.
• What to read, watch, cook, and listen to under coronavirus quarantine.

Robin Wright has been a contributing writer to The New Yorker since 1988. She is the author of “Rock the Casbah: Rage and Rebellion Across the Islamic World.”

Art

   In placid hours well-pleased we dream
Of many a brave unbodied scheme.
But form to lend, pulsed life create,
What unlike things must meet and mate:
A flame to melt—a wind to freeze;
Sad patience—joyous energies;
Humility—yet pride and scorn;
Instinct and study; love and hate;
Audacity—reverence. These must mate,
And fuse with Jacob’s mystic heart,
To wrestle with the angel—Art.

–Herman Melville

(Submitted by Bonnie Turbeville)

Cameron Kyle-Sidell Patients need OXYGEN NOT PRESSURE!!! The ventilators may be causing lung damage because of PRESSURE. Needs to be immediately investigated. 100,000 – 250,000 Americans at risk of lung injury. Change can happen. The time is NOW!! #oxygennotpressure#thetimeisnow

“Truth is the offspring of silence and meditation.”

BY MARIA POPOVA (brainpickings.org)

In the 1650s, the penumbra of plague slowly began eclipsing Europe. Italy fell first, soon Spain, then Germany, then Holland. From across the slender cell wall of the Channel, England watched and trembled, then cautiously relaxed — for about a decade, some divine will seemed to be shielding the country. But the world was already worshipping at the altar of commerce and the forces of globalization had already been set into motion — with England’s economy relying heavily on trade, its ports bustled with ships carrying silk and tea and sugar from all discovered frontiers of the globe. Rats boarded the ships, fleas boarded the rats, bacteria — an almost-kingdom of unicellular organisms yet to be coronated, for the cell itself was yet to be discovered — boarded the fleas, which took to human flesh as soon as they debarked.

And so, on Christmas Day 1664, a single plague death was reported in London. Another came in February, then another. “Great fears of sickness here in the City,” the legendary diarist Samuel Pepys was writing by April. “God preserve us all.”

God was no match for the absence of a basic scientific understanding of biology and epidemiology. The deaths were swift, gruesome, and, soon, so voluminous that services ceased being held. Over the course of the summer, the death toll swelled tenfold, from hundreds to thousands per week. The infected were ordered not to leave their homes. Many were boarded in and left to die in isolation, an enormous cross painted on the outside of each plagued house. Plays, spectator blood sports, and other crowd gatherings were banned. Street vendors were banned from selling their wares, newsboys ceased crying and retreated indoors. An awful, alien silence came to blanket this capital of din. The universities closed.

When Cambridge sent its students home, a young man obsessed with mathematics, motion, and light, whose illiterate father had died three months before his birth, who worshipped a “God of order and not of confusion,” and who had begun his university studies by performing servants’ work for wealthier students in exchange for tuition, bundled his prized books and headed back to his mother’s farm.

There, in solitude and isolation, as the plague continued its deadly sweep, Isaac Newton (December 25, 1642–March 19, 1727) dreamt up the fulcrum that would dislodge humanity from the Dark Ages; there, the apple — real or apocryphal — fell, and in its shadow rose the revolutionary idea of gravity, which the young man envisioned as a force “extending to the orb of the Moon” all the way from the Earth, without “cutoff or boundary.” It was there, too, that he set out to compute that force, “requisite to keep the Moon in her Orb with the force of gravity at the surface of the earth”; in the act of computing it, as a necessity of that act, he invented calculus.

In his excellent Isaac Newton (public library) — a gold standard of biography and of storytelling bridging the scientific with the poetic, which also gave us the story behind the famous “standing on the shoulders of giants” metaphor — James Gleick writes of the young Newton’s plague-driven return home:

He built bookshelves and made a small study for himself. He opened the nearly blank thousand-page commonplace book he had inherited from his stepfather and named it his Waste Book. He began filling it with reading notes. These mutated seamlessly into original research. He set himself problems; considered them obsessively; calculated answers, and asked new questions. He pushed past the frontier of knowledge (though he did not know this). The plague year was his transfiguration. Solitary and almost incommunicado, he became the world’s paramount mathematician.

From the fortunate platform of a long life — he lived to eighty-four, more than double the era’s life expectancy, his casket shouldered by dukes and earls — Newton would look back on his most intellectually fertile period of the plague years with the recognition that “truth is the offspring of silence and meditation.”

Complement this fragment of Gleick’s indispensable Isaac Newton with Tocqueville on stillness as a form of action and the trailblazing 18th-century French mathematician Émilie du Châtelet, who popularized Newton’s science, on the nature of genius, then revisit Gleick’s splendid reading of and reflection on Elizabeth Bishop’s poem about the nature of knowledge.

By Delia Gallagher

Wed April 8, 2020 (cnn.com)

Rome (CNN)Pope Francis has said the coronavirus pandemic is one of “nature’s responses” to humans ignoring the current ecological crisis.In an email interview published Wednesday in The Tablet and Commonwealth magazines, the pontiff said the outbreak offered an opportunity to slow down the rate of production and consumption and to learn to understand and contemplate the natural world.”We did not respond to the partial catastrophes. Who now speaks of the fires in Australia, or remembers that 18 months ago a boat could cross the North Pole because the glaciers had all melted? Who speaks now of the floods?” the Pope said.Pope Francis celebrates Palm Sunday mass in an empty church“I don’t know if these are the revenge of nature, but they are certainly nature’s responses,” he added.Content by CNN UnderscoredIf you can’t wait for Amazon shipping, shop these other online retailersAmazon is only restocking essential goods in its warehouses, so it’s time to diversify your online shopping habits. To help, we’ve rounded up a long list of alternatives.The pandemic has radically changed the way the Vatican operates, with the Pope celebrating Palm Sunday mass in an empty church and the sites normally packed with tourists empty.The 83-year-old Pope, who has a damaged lung from an infection in his 20s, has twice tested negative for the novel coronavirus. He is being distanced from anyone who might be carrying the virus, takes his meals in his private quarters, and uses hand sanitizer before and after meeting any guests, the Vatican press office said.Pope Francis also said in the interview he was recovering from his bronchitis and praying even more from his residence in the Vatican during this “time of great uncertainty.”

Pope Francis presides over a moment of prayer on the sagrato of St Peters Basilica on March 27.Francis also revealed he goes to confession every Tuesday to ask forgiveness for his own selfishness. “I take care of things there,” he said.He also criticized the response to the outbreak, saying the homeless should be quarantined in hotels and not in parking lots.”A photo appeared the other day of a parking lot in Las Vegas where they [the homeless] had been put in quarantine. And the hotels were empty. But the homeless cannot go to a hotel,” the Pope said.Quarantine life is starting to feel like a real Lent“This is the moment to see the poor,” he said, adding that society often treats those in need as “rescued animals.”The Pope also warned against the rise of populist politicians — who he said are giving speeches reminiscent of Hitler in 1933 — and others who are focusing solely on the economy. He said he was worried by the “hypocrisy of certain political personalities who speak of facing up to the crisis, of the problem of hunger in the world, but who in the meantime manufacture weapons.”The Pope encouraged those in a lockdown to find creative ways of being at home. “Take care of yourselves for a future that will come,” Francis said.

(Submitted by Sarah Flynn)

Eric Todisco People April 7, 2020 (yahoo.com)

Heath Ledger was dedicated to the message behind the groundbreaking film Brokeback Mountain — so much so that he refused to make jokes about the film’s homosexual love story.

In a recent interview with Another Man magazine, Jake Gyllenhaal, who starred opposite Ledger in Ang Lee’s film, said that the late actor refused to present at the 2007 Academy Awards over a joke involving their characters’ romantic relationship.

“I mean, I remember they wanted to do an opening for the Academy Awards that year that was sort of joking about it, Gyllenhaal, 39, recalled.

“And Heath refused,” he explained. “I was sort of at the time, ‘Oh, okay… whatever.’ I’m always like, ‘It’s all in good fun.’ And Heath said, ‘It’s not a joke to me – I don’t want to make any jokes about it.’ ”

The actor added, “That’s the thing I loved about Heath. He would never joke. Someone wanted to make a joke about the story or whatever, he was like, ‘No. This is about love. Like, that’s it, man. Like, no.’ ”

Gyllenhaal and Ledger starred as Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar, respectively, in the film, which explores their unexpected love story in the American West across two decades. Michelle Williams and Anne Hathaway also star.

The classic romance received eight Academy Award nominations at the 2007 ceremony, including acting nominations for both Gyllenhaal and Ledger. In a surprise to many, the film ultimately lost in the Best Picture category to Crash.

RELATED: Jake Gyllenhaal ‘Loved’ That Heath Ledger Would Shut Down Homophobic Brokeback Mountain Jokes

Kevin Winter/Getty

In an interview on Sunday Today in July, Gyllenhaal spoke about how the film impacted his career, sharing that it had been unlike any other film he’d done before.

“When we did Brokeback Mountain, I was like, ‘Whoa, what’s going on?’ This is a level of focus and attention that hits a certain nerve and you’re like, ‘This is bigger than me,’ ” he explained. “I understand what it is but this little movie we made that meant so much to us has now become not ours anymore. It’s the world’s.”

RELATED: Brokeback Mountain 10 Years Later: Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway Remember Heath Ledger and Look Back on the Oscar-Winning Film

Gyllenhaal has also been open up the deep impact Ledger’s death in 2008 has had on him.

“Personally, it affected me in ways I can’t necessarily put in words or even would want to talk about publicly,” Gyllenhaal told PEOPLE in 2016. “In terms of professionally, I think I was at an age where mortality was not always clear to me.”

Having turned 27 at the time of Ledger’s death, Gyllenhaal said that he had not lost many friends at that point in his life.

“It [gave me] the experience of, ‘This is fleeting.’ And none of the attention or synthesized love that comes from the success of a film really matters at all,” he shared. “What matters is the relationships you make when you make a film, and the people you learn from when you’re preparing for a film. That changed a lot for me.”

Beyond the Mist Billye G. Talmadge CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, Nov 3, 2016 – 64 pages Billye Talmadge has been writing most of her adult life. Her interest in mystery stories led her to write for many mystery magazines. Unfortunately, many of her writings have been lost with time. Her true genius was in the classes and seminars she taught. Her many students in public schools and private arenas lives are better because she was their teacher. Her compassion and ability to see each student as an individual helped release their potential as a human being

About the author (2016)

Billye Talmadge, H.W., M., born on December 7, 1929 in Missouri, and raised by her mother in Oklahoma. The black sheep of the Talmadge family she is the niece of former Georgia Senator and Governor Herman E Talmadge. In September 1955 she joined a group of other women in Rose Bamberger’s living room for a gathering that would lay the foundation for the Daughters of Bilitis, (DOB) the first lesbian civil rights group in America. By 1958 DOB had formed a network of local chapters across the country and between 1960-1970 DOB sponsored public conventions on gay and lesbian issues. Billye acted as educator to the women that came as well as in interviews and literature, presenting the DOB and GLBT issues in a non-threatening manner to the general public. She was involved with the Gab ‘n Java sessions, The Ladder magazine, and in the formation and development of the Council on Religion and Homosexuals. She was an early supporter of Troy Perry and the formation of the MCC church. From the very beginning she was heavily involved in education and peer-to-peer counseling, which often was as-simple-as reassuring Lesbians they were not ill or depraved. DOB became more and more involved with civil rights, instead of speaking in terms of gay and lesbian DOB often used the term variant, as in alternate sexual preference. Members were assured that their identity would be kept secret as it was a time when many would have lost their jobs or been expelled from school if their sexual and gender preferences were known. Early on Billye became interested in human sexuality and the variations it represented. She has always identified as female, but taught and showed that the androgynous nature we all have, allows us to identify as any gender. She was instrumental in providing the philosophy for Del Martin and Phyl Lyons activities on human sexuality in San Francisco. Billye has dedicated her life to education and inclusion of all women. Her memories are full of DOB and the early days and the individual stories of the women who came to DOB seeking both shelter and companionship from their well of loneliness in a world who rejected them. Billye has written for mystery magazines as well as professional journals.

(Google Books)

“The world is not here to make you happy. It’s here to make you conscious.”

–Eckhart Tolle

Eckhart Tolle (born February 16, 1948) is a spiritual teacher and best-selling author. He is a German-born resident of Canada best known as the author of The Power of Now and A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose. In 2008, The New York Times called Tolle “the most popular spiritual author in the United States”. Wikipedia