"I'm not interested in the darkness anymore"

The most amazing personal stories are always about transformation.  That's why conversion stories are so compelling.  Today for  example we have the story of Joe Eszterhas and he's written a book about it.

"Crossbearer: A Memoir of Faith" (Joe Eszterhas)

He wrote dark thrillers like Basic Instinct and Jagged Edge and lived a wild life.  After moving to Cleveland with his second wife, he was diagnosed with throat cancer.

Doctors at the Cleveland Clinic removed 80 percent of his larynx, put a tracheotomy tube in his throat, and told him he must quit drinking and smoking immediately...

"I was going crazy. I was jittery. I twitched. I trembled. I had no patience for anything. … Every single nerve ending was demanding a drink and a cigarette," he wrote.

He plopped down on a curb and cried. Sobbed, even. And for the first time since he was a child, he prayed: "Please God, help me."

Mr. Eszterhas was shocked by his own prayer.

"I couldn't believe I'd said it. I didn't know why I'd said it. I'd never said it before," he wrote.

But he felt an overwhelming peace. His heart stopped pounding. His hands stopped twitching. He saw a "shimmering, dazzling, nearly blinding brightness that made me cover my eyes with my hands."

Like Saul on the road to Damascus, Mr. Eszterhas had been blinded by God. He stood up, wiped his eyes, and walked back home a new man.

In a phone interview this week, Mr. Eszterhas said it was "an absolutely overwhelming experience."

'Basic Instinct' author writes book about faith.

But after his spiritual transformation, he said, he had had enough of death, murder, blood, and chaos.

"Frankly my life changed from the moment God entered my heart. I'm not interested in the darkness anymore," he said. "I've got four gorgeous boys, a wife I adore, I love being alive, and I love and enjoy every moment of my life. My view has brightened and I don't want to go back into that dark place."

Mr. Eszterhas' love and appreciation for life was magnified even more last year when his surgeon told him he didn't need to schedule another visit.

The Pills that will Change Your Life

A drug to cure cancer. Another to halt aging. In the not-so-distant future, these six drugs—already in the works—will change how we live, and even how we die

This Pill Will Change Your Life via Instapundit

Here are the six Pop Sci zeroes in on

cancer vaccine
male birth control pill
anti-addiction pill
exercise pill
anti-aging pill
smart pill

Survey on the Generations

Boomer narcissism, ageism debunked.

Harris Interactive surveyed  3868 adults between 21 and 83.

Between "the Greatest Generation" and "Gen Y" - five generations of Americans now populate the nation, each distinct and boasting opinions about themselves and one another that often run counter to persistent cultural myths.

Like ageism.

Americans don't hate old people. Americans love old people.

And the Boomers aren't half as fake, annoying and self-absorbed as their collective public image might indicate.

"Rendered powerless by sheer inattention"

Orson Scott Card is The Ornery American and writing about Alexander Solzhenitsyn  in  Nobody Was Listening.

Let me quote just one passage from Solzhenitsyn's speech: "A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days. The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, each government, each political party and of course in the United Nations.

"Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society. Of course there are many courageous individuals but they have no determining influence on public life."

--
Alexandr Solzhenitsyn died last week. For the last thirty years of his life he was almost unheard-of. He was dismissed by our media elite as a has-been, a grumpy old man who dared to criticize them as scathingly as he criticized the Communists. They declared him No Longer Interesting.

But he is as important as he ever was. He was mostly right about the Soviet Union; he was mostly right about us.

In the Soviet Union, he was seen as dangerous.

In America, he was rendered powerless by sheer inattention.

A whiskey a day

10 cigars a day and a shot of whiskey in his morning tea is the secret to Jack Priestly's long life, now 100.

A retired baker and a widower since 1993, Jack
keeps active by going shopping, gardening and keeping chickens.

Jack stopped driving two months ago and now gets about on a motorised scooter.

He said: "I don't feel my age. I've still the mind of a young man. But if I had the company of a good woman, I'm sure I'd feel 40 years younger in a flash."

Babies, Rickets and Breastfeeding

If a mother does not have enough vitamin, neither will the baby she breastfeeds.

Please check, no more babies with rickets.

Vitamin D Deficiency May Lurk in Babies

“I thought I was doing the best thing for her,” said Stephanie Remy-Marquez, of Hyde Park, Mass., after blood tests showed her daughter had no detectable vitamin D. X-ray images of the baby’s wrists and knees showed the edges of the bones and growth plates as blurry and fraying instead of crisp and sharp.

“Breast milk is supposed to be an entire meal, dessert and drinks included,” Ms. Remy-Marquez said. “I thought it was the ultimate cocktail.”
--
Physicians have known for more than a century that exclusive breast-feeding may be associated with vitamin D deficiency and rickets, and that the condition is easily prevented and treated with inexpensive vitamin drops or cod liver oil. But doctors are reluctant to say anything that might discourage breast-feeding.

Now some researchers are also linking vitamin D deficiency with other chronic diseases like diabetes, autoimmune disorders and even cancer, and there have been calls to include blood tests of vitamin D levels in routine checkups.

"My parents were punks"

It's the new counter-culture.

Can Good Feminists Bake Cupcakes?

For Nikki Shail, the aesthetic of the 1950s housewife has always been attractive. "My mother was not remotely like that, so for me it's a glamorous, romantic thing," she says. "I love the way it's very feminine and I find a strength in that femininity." The events marketing manager from Kingston, Surrey, devotes her spare time to dressing up as her alter ego, Cherry Bakewell, a 50s goddess who whisks up batches of fairy cakes for the good of humanity.
--

--
Anything which is very personal and behind closed doors and pleasurable for women is subversive these days," she says wryly. When her book, The Gentle Art of Domesticity, was published last year, she was horrified to be dubbed a purveyor of "pinny porn", as if she was committing some kind of sacrilege by knitting her own tea cosies.

--
it is this frisson of the taboo that appeals to a new generation of young women, who seem to love the novelty of baking and dressing up in aprons. Jazz D Holly, 24, an aspiring playwright from east London, is the president of the Shoreditch Sisters, the youngest branch of the Women's Institute, which has 20 members who meet regularly to swap recipes and knitting patterns. For her, domesticity is about rebellion: "I think it is a reaction to 1990s ladette culture and the sense of androgyny around that. I don't like the idea that we are exactly the same as men. I think it is damaging to women's self-respect."
...For my generation, girls in their 20s, all my friends, it's a cultural shift, almost a movement: many people are fascinated by retro ideas. I have always been fascinated by the postwar mentality." Part of this feeds into the thrift movement. "It's coming back to something with a bit more value when everything today is so fast, and technology is so advanced."
--

In Holly's case it is also a personal stance. "My parents were punks," - her father was Joe Strummer of the Clash -"so I had a chaotic childhood. You try to be subversive by not doing what your parents did. It was not rebellious for me to go out drinking and taking drugs because that was what my parents did. I've always been fascinated by knowing how to knit but I had to learn it from my great-grandmother because my mother did not do anything like that and my grandmother was part of the whole 1960s women's lib thing."

Metaphor for so many things

I laugh every time I watch this.

The Termite's Moment in the Sun

Gut Reactions

The greatest mystery of all is found in the worker termite’s third gut, which is delineated by an intricately structured stomach valve, as unique from species to species as individual snowflakes are and, in its way, just as lovely. The size of a sesame seed, the third gut contains a dense mush of symbiotic microbes. Many of these microbes live nowhere else on Earth; they depend on adult termites to pass them on to the young by means of a “woodshake,” a microbial slurry.
--
This microbial mush may be a treasure trove for the human race. Recently, sophisticated genetic sequencing produced an inventory of more than 80,000 genes, spanning some 300 microbial species, from the guts of Costa Rican termites. These findings, published last November in the journal Nature, got a lot of attention, not for the quantity of microorganisms—after all, the human mouth contains 600 species of bacteria—but for their complexity, and in particular for the fact that among them are 500 genes for enzymes able to break down the cellulose in wood and grasses.
--
The little biorefineries inside each termite allow the insects to eat up $11 billion in U.S. property every year. But some scientists and policy makers believe they may also make the termite a sort of biotech Rumpelstiltskin, able to spin straw—or grass, or wood by-products—into something much more valuable. Offer a termite this page, and its microbial helpers will break it down into two liters of hydrogen, enough to drive more than six miles in a fuel-cell car. If we could turn wood waste into fuel with even a fraction of the termite’s efficiency, we could run our economy on sawdust, lawn clippings, and old magazines.
--
And so the termite may be poised for its moment in the sun. Speaking last year about moving toward a biofuel economy, Energy Secretary Samuel W. Bodman pointed to the termite-to-tank concept, asserting, “We know this can be done.” Another official called it a promising “transformational discovery.

Magnetic Movie

It's quite extraordinary to see the chaos of the magnetic fields all around us.  From Magnetic Movie.

With Magnetic Movie, Semiconductor have tapped into a new and ancient aesthetic of turbulence. We can hear it in the sounds of natural radio-naturally-occurring electromagnetic signals from the earth's ionosphere and magnetosphere-that course through Magnetic Movie, at times animating the animation, a quick nervous response condensed into static. The sound itself is the product of the combined turbulences of the earth's molten core, weather systems and electrical storms, ephemeral ionization in the upper atmosphere, and the solar winds. What we hear is underscored with complex and supple orders, in fact, too complex and supple to be ordered. We already have experience of them in the tangible turbulence of water and the crazy convection of fluids combining, tongues of fire and the thermal afterthought of smoke, the ribbons of clouds stiffly blown twisted up a hill. The flux championed by Hericlitus that has awed audiences since antiquity.

Global amnesia

A woman goes to bed as 32 -year-old mother of one and wakes up a 15-year-old.

The next morning, I woke into a nightmare. I was convinced I was my 15-year-old self. Distressed and confused, I wondered why I wasn't in my comfy lower bunk bed, covered in a pink Marilyn Monroe bedspread, sharing a room with my sister. ....

Yet here I was in a two-bedroom council house with a room full of books, a cat and an 11-year-old son I didn't recognise. In those first hours, I paced my bedroom convinced I was going mad. I can remember looking in the bathroom mirror and starting to scream. Through the eyes of a 15-year-old, what I saw was horrifying; who was this ageing woman with crow's-feet, spots and bags under her eyes?

I woke up in the future.

Cards for Same Sex Weddings

Responding to consumer demand, Hallmark offers "coming out" cards for homosexuals and now same-sex marriage cards.

The language inside, "Two hearts. One promise" is neutral enough so the card can also work for commitment ceremonies.

Friends across the pond

Battling the growing phenomenon of  anti-Americanism, a British group has organized a website called America in the World.    Good for them.

AmericaInTheWorld is a London-based international alliance opposed to anti-Americanism as well as American isolationism. Via our briefings, we aim to provide the number one factual resource for those who wish to hear the case against anti-Americanism. Our goal is to increase understanding of America, to debunk some of the leading myths about the United States, and to make a positive case for a continuing leading role for America in the world.

AmericaInTheWorld is launched and funded by supporters of America in London and around the world. AmericaInTheWorld receives no American government or corporate funding.

Here's a video A World Without The American Soldier

For their launch, they commissioned a poll of 2000 U.K. citizens to find that Large numbers of British citizens consistently and inaccurately think the worst of America.

The first part of our survey would suggest that large numbers of Britons think America is a land where polygamy is legal, where you don't get emergency medical care if you are poor and where there is more racism than in Europe. Britons also think that America provided Saddam Hussein with a large share of his weapons when, in reality, Russia, China and France were responsible for most of the arms exports to his Iraq.  On all of these questions Britons are wrong.

Best of all, they are associated with no party and offer fact-filled briefings that can settle many arguments.

You Got to Have Hope

Science Day reports on a growing body of research that suggests 'Hope" Therapy Fights Depression.

We’re finding that hope is consistently associated with fewer symptoms of depression.  And the good news is that hope is something that can be taught, and can be developed in many of the people who need it,” said Jennifer Cheavens, assistant professor of psychology at Ohio State University.
--

“If you feel you know how to get what you want out of life, and you have that desire to make that happen, then you have hope,” Cheavens said.

Hope is different from optimism, which is a generalized expectancy that good things will happen, she said.  Hope involves having goals, along with the desire and plan to achieve them.

***B.O.O.K.

The new Bio-Optic Organized Knowledge Device

BOOK is a revolutionary breakthrough in technology: no wires, no electric circuits, no batteries, nothing to be connected or switched on. It’s so easy to use, even a child can operate it.

Compact and portable, it can be used anywhere — even sitting in an armchair by the fire — yet it is powerful enough to hold as much information as a CD-ROM.
--
The “browse” feature allows you to move instantly to any sheet, and move forward or backward as you wish. Many come with an “index” feature, which pin-points the exact location of any selected information for instant retrieval.

An optional “BOOKmark” accessory allows you to open BOOK to the exact place you left it in a previous session — even if the BOOK has been closed.

How to Spot a Liar

They hold off blinking while telling you the lie, then blink in a flurry afterwards.

It's all to do with the 'blinking' obvious

Liars blink in different ways during and after a falsehood, researchers claim.

They blink less than normal during the lie, and then have a flurry up to eight times faster than usual afterwards.

'It is striking what different patterns in eye blinks emerged for liars and truth tellers,' said Dr Sharon Leal, co-author of the study at Portsmouth University.

'Such striking differences in behaviour between liars and truth tellers are rarely seen in deception research.'

The psychologists say that the discovery, reported in the Journal of Non-verbal Behaviour, means that blink rates could be used by professionals to catch liar

The Religious Scruples of Doctors

California has thousands upon thousands of medical practitioners. The doctors in this case were not seeking to ban in-vitro fertilization for gay couples. They were simply saying, “Don’t make me do it.”

What they want is freedom: freedom to hold their convictions just as gay couples are free to hold theirs. Freedom to depart from a secular-belief system tyrannically imposed by government — governments having been known to impose any number of beliefs deemed de rigueur at the time . . . and remembered now only for their close-minded noxiousness.

In modern America, plenty of room has been made for gay couples and their life choices. We needn’t vanquish religious believers to make those accommodations. Trying to do so, as California is, will not result in harmony and societal progress. It will add to the campaign of political correctness slowly and needlessly tearing the nation asunder.

Andrew McCarthy's  Tyranny in the Name of Progress on the decision of a California court to ban religious objections of doctors when it comes to in vitro fertilization for same-sex pregnancies.    In North Coast Women's Care v. Benitez, the California Supreme Court

runs roughshod over the First Amendment’s free-exercise clause, seeking to supplant Judeo-Christian principles with the state-imposed religion of secularism. This is a false choice under the federal Constitution, which makes room for both.

I predict that we will see many more such court decisions in a struggle to accommodate both religious freedom and laws banning discrimination against homosexuals. 

A Well Worn Apron

Jennifer's goal in life is to have a well-worn apron

I realized that if I ever have an apron hanging from the pantry door that is threadbare and covered in stains, I have probably lived a pretty good life. Because having a well-worn apron means:

You have food to eat
You have someone to cook for
You have someone to sit down at the table with you to share in the fruits of your efforts
You have the resources and the physical ability to make homemade meals
You have the energy and the money to wear clothes that are nice enough to be worth protecting
You care enough to do all of the above.

Premature Baby "Comes Back to Life" in Morgue Cooler

Premature baby 'comes back to life 

The 26-year-old mother and her husband have a five-year-old son at home. When she gave birth after going into premature labor at the hospital, the doctor on the scene pronounced it dead and it was taken to the morgue.

The father, Ali Majdub, told Channel 2 that his wife realized the child was alive after asking to see her dead daughter one last time.

"When we unwrapped the baby to see her, she realized it was moving. I began screaming and ran with it toward the doctors," he said.

She was then rushed to the neonatal intensive care unit, where doctors are fighting for her life.
--
Dr. Moshe Daniel, the hospital's deputy director, said that in his 35 years as a physician, he had "never heard of such a case. It was like a medical miracle."

.... Daniel speculated that the cooling effect of the morgue slowed the infant's metabolism, causing her oxygen consumption to be very low. There have been rare cases of people who nearly froze under snow "coming back to life," but there have been no reports of babies doing so.

UPDATE:

The little baby has since died

The survival of such an immature baby, whether she was in an incubator or a cooler in the morgue, was very unlikely, said Eidelman. "It was a borderline case," he said, adding that she almost inevitably would have suffered from severe disability if she had lived.

The Sudden Emergence of Consciousness

Just what happened in those caves?

Alasdair Coles on The Sudden Emergence of Consciousness

The Upper Paleolithic Revolution consisted of more than just cave paintings. Visual creativity emerged in many other ways. Burial rites become more complex. And, it is speculated, the first music was made and the first words spoken. van Huyssteen argues that the key distinction between Upper Paleolithic man and homo sapiens elsewhere and earlier hominids, was the power to construct and understand symbol, of which language of course is a part. This ability to ‘code the invisible’ allowed for storage of information outside of the gene and the start of the cultural non-genetic inheritance. The ‘mental toolkit’ required to manage symbolic representation is the ‘ability to be conscious of being conscious’ and to search for meaning. The new humans wake up, discover they are naked and meet God.

What Now?

Some 40% of Olympians have serious problems post Olympics as they transition to a new chapter of their lives.

After Glory of a Lifetime, Asking 'What Now?'

“You’re talking about people who have trained for years, almost every day, and made huge sacrifices,” in their relationships, career, all of it, said Charlie Brown, a sports psychologist at FPS Performance in Charlotte, N.C., whose clients include Olympic kayakers, swimmers and runners. “And for some of them, once they have this huge, intense experience, it’s a very fragile situation afterwards.”

Fat Missionary Lady

Forget James Bond, this is what British spies look like.  And yes, they had a license to kill

The two peers look like innocent old ladies, but in fact they were two of the Cold War's most formidable spies. They drink tea, stirred not shaken, rather than Martinis, shaken not stirred, and they wouldn't be seen dead in an Aston Martin
--
Lady Park, 88, ran agents in Hanoi during the Vietnam War, smuggled defectors out of the Congo in the boot of her Citroën 2CV and was posted to Moscow when the KGB was at the height of its powers. Lady Ramsay, 72, was on the MI6 Iraq desk during the Gulf War and worked in Helsinki when Finland was an intelligence crossroads. She also helped to persuade Oleg Gordievsky, a colonel in the KGB, to defect.
--
I always looked just like a fat missionary, which was very useful. Missionaries get around, you know,” Lady Park says.

More Miss Marple than 007: The True Face of British Espionage.

Time for Maintenance

To no one's surprise women spend 3276 hours of their lives just getting ready for a night out, three times what men spend.

The biggest chunk of that time – up to half an hour – is spent showering, washing and styling their hair, followed by 20 minutes applying make-up and 15 minutes polishing finger and toe nails.
---
“There’s a host of waxing, exfoliating, moisturising, straightening, polishing and plucking involved

Where Not to be a Child

The worst place in the Western world to be a child is Britain reports UNICEF; Theodore Dalrymple calls it Childhood's End.

The British, never fond of children, have lost all knowledge or intuition about how to raise them; as a consequence, they now fear them, perhaps the most terrible augury possible for a society.

Extraordinary Birth

Donnette Sanz, 33, and 7 months pregnant was crossing the street when she was hit by a runaway school bus with no children in it.

"My brakes went out as I was coming from Valentine [Avenue]," van driver Walter Walker, 72, told The Post before cops picked him up. "The light turned red, and I couldn't stop . . . I tried to miss her.

"I tried to go behind her, but she stopped and moved back, and I hit her," he said, holding his head in his hands.
_
Within seconds, more than two dozen strangers - from a nearby park, the busy sidewalk and a construction site - poured into the street to aid Sanz.

"Twenty of us started lifting up the bus - about 10 more came to help," said hardhat Madalina Diaz, 42, of Ardsley. "We didn't really communicate, we all just started lifting. We lifted it up and someone pulled her out.
--

Sanz was rushed into the St. Barnabas emergency room at 2:18 p.m. She survived the emergency delivery, and died at 4:22 p.m., a spokesman said.

Her baby was taken to the neonatal intensive-care unit and placed on a ventilator.

The baby boy was named Sean Michael

Pregnant Woman Killed by Bus

"Unless we will ourselves blind"

Gerald Vanderleun gives us The Frame-Up.  The mystery of the world revealed in a backyard using an empty picture frame. 

The world is made of a perceptible mystery beyond our means of measuring, but not beyond all sight unless we will ourselves blind.

Celestial Beauty and Quantum Weirdness

This picture released on the occasion of the 100,000 orbit of the Hubble telescope shows us a dazzling image of celestial beauty and renewal,

Hubble peered into a small portion of the Tarantula nebula near the star cluster NGC 2074. The region is a firestorm of raw stellar creation, perhaps triggered by a nearby supernova explosion. It lies about 170,000 light-years away and is one of the most active star-forming regions in our local group of galaxies.

The image reveals dramatic ridges and valleys of dust, serpent-head "pillars of creation," and gaseous filaments glowing fiercely under torrential ultraviolet radiation. The region is on the edge of a dark molecular cloud that is an incubator for the birth of new stars.

The high-energy radiation blazing out from clusters of hot young stars is sculpting the wall of the nebula by slowly eroding it away. Another young cluster may be hidden beneath a circle of brilliant blue gas.

In this approximately 100-light-year-wide fantasy-like landscape, dark towers of dust rise above a glowing wall of gases on the surface of the molecular cloud. The seahorse-shaped pillar at lower, right is approximately 20 light-years long, roughly four times the distance between our sun and the nearest star, Alpha Centauri.

The region is in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite of our Milky Way galaxy. It is a fascinating laboratory for observing star-formation regions and their evolution. Dwarf galaxies like the Large Magellanic Cloud are considered to be the primitive building blocks of larger galaxies.

Quantum Weirdness is even stranger than they thought and physicists are spooked by faster-than-light information transfer.

The revelations of these scientific discoveries leave me in awe.

The Russian Bear is Back

I go away for a few days and war breaks out with Russia invading its next-door neighbor the newly democratic state of Georgia.

Did the balance of power just tip?  According to Donald Sensing in Russia's the hare, the UN's the tortoise, yes.

Russia will have its way, whatever its way actually is, and the US and the West will do exactly nothing. The US will not go to war to turn Russia back (nor would the US be able to do so even if it wanted), and Europe can't go to war without the US. Absent a credible threat of force, the protestations of diplomats mean precisely zilch because there are no sanctions that are remotely possible that Vladimir Putin et. al. will think more painful than the benefits of enforcing their will against Georgia.

The balance of power just tipped, folks, and there is not one darn thing we can do about it.

Via American Digest